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CDIVRICHT DEPOSm 



THE FAITH OF A MODERN 
PROTESTANT 



The Faith of a 
Modern Protestant 



^ BY 

WILHELM BOUSSET 

PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GOTTINGEN 

AUTHOR OF "what IS RELIGION?" 



TRANSLATED BY F. B. LOW 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1909 



^'tl 



LIBRARY of OONGRESc 
Two Copies Received 

JAN 20 1909 

Copyfiiirit Entry _ 
BUSS a, XXc, Mo, 



Copyright, 1909, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published January, 1909 




CONTENTS 



PAGE 



INTRODUCTION 3 



CHAPTER 

I. THE QUESTION STATED S 



THE ANSWER OF FAITH 

II. THE FOUNDATION I ALMIGHTY GOD 20 

III. GOD AND THE SOUL • . 29 

DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH 

IV. PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 5 1 

V. GOD AND THE GOOD 66 

THE SUMMIT 

VI. REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENE^ OF SINS ... 87 



VII. ETERNAL HOPE I07 

V (vi blank) 



THE FAITH OF A MODERN 
PROTESTANT 



THE FAITH OF A MODERN 
PROTESTANT 

INTRODUCTION 

TN every religion belief in God, or to express 
it from a more universal point of view, be- 
lief in the gods, in the Godhead, is the central 
idea. Where this is not so, as in the exceptional 
case of the earliest form of Buddhism, we have 
to deal with an attenuated religion, permeated 
with a philosophic conception of the world. 

Our object in this little book is to try to 
define, by comparison, the peculiar position 
and the characteristic qualities of our belief — 
that is to say, of the Christian belief in God 
— so far as it concerns the religious life of man- 
kind, and thus to comprehend the essential 
character of the Christian religion. At the 
same time we must put the question as to the 
nature of the Christian belief in God. In the 
history of Christianity we are confronted with 
an '^normous variety of forms, and among the 
ever-varying phenomena we must seek to dis- 

3 



4 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

cover the permanent and the essential. We do 
this by directing our glance backwards to the 
creative starting point of this religion, to the 
life of Jesus of Nazareth, and also by studying 
the innumerable forms and expressions through 
which that seed reached its development, as 
well as the long list of heroes of the Christian 
faith. But we cannot avoid putting our own 
subjectivity into this stream of living events 
and asking the question. Wherein lies the power 
of the Christian belief in God, which works on 
us, or can and must work on us ? Yet we ask 
the question in such a way that we do not re- 
gard our subjectivity as sovereign and alone 
decisive. We are prepared in the plenitude of 
historical experience constantly to correct our 
own point of view, voluntarily, without any ex- 
ternal compulsion laid upon us by authority. 

All religious life, however, consciously or 
unconsciously, is linked to definite, personal 
needs, difficulties and problems which touch 
most deeply our inmost being, our individual 
ego. Faith frees us from these difficulties, and 
gives an answer to the problems of life. Thus 
it is with the Christian faith in God. We listen 
both to the anxious questioning which arises 
from our souls, and to the answer which our 
faith in God gives us. 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUESTION STATED 

TX rE human beings find ourselves with our 
^ ^ whole Hfe and being a part of an uni- 
versal existence, and we ask ourselves concern- 
ing our relation to this existence, and the mean- 
ing of our life in it. We put that existence on 
the one hand and our life on the other. And 
the first feeling that comes to us — especially 
to us modern men — is the tremendous feeling 
of our own insignificance, powerlessness, and 
dwarf-like nature. The men of the ancient 
world could banish this feeling. Secure and 
firm, the earth rested at their feet, in the centre 
of the universe, surrounded by the constellations. 
Over it rose the brazen arch of heaven, and 
above, not too far off, dwelt the gods, the God- 
head. The man of the ancient world could 
still feel himself lord on the globe, and so could 
think of defying the gods and laughing at them. 
And when death approached him, he saw 
children and grandchildren — a long series of 
generations who should rule the earth even as 

5 



6 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

he had done. To the most earnest and profound 
minds of ancient days life offered, indeed, rid- 
dles which could not be banished. But still 
the former frame of mind was always possible 
and attainable. How different it is with us 
children of a modern day when we consider 
ourselves and our lives, if only for a moment! 
For to us the world has grown immeasur- 
ably greater. According to our perception our 
earth has been removed from the centre of the 
universe, and now revolves as an atom round 
the sun, and the latter again revolves round a 
distant, unknown centre, and with all its starry 
host occupies but a remote corner in the uni- 
verse. And those bodies which we call the 
friendly stars, which illumine the heavens, are, 
in truth, fiery volcanoes, so immense and so 
terrifying that no human imagination can picture 
them. But we, ourselves, are placed between 
two infinities in time and space — ^the infinity of 
the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. And 
if astronomy with telescope and spy-glass leads 
us into the world of the macrocosmos and shows 
to our amazed imagination suns after suns, 
systems after systems of fixed stars and central 
suns, and reveals in nebulous spots, scarcely 
visible to the eye, unknown worlds whose rela- 
tions of time and space bewilder us, on the other 



THE QUESTION STATED 7 

hand, biology, with its microscope and artificial 
breeding of bacteria, introduces us into the 
world of the microcosmos and teaches us the 
wonderful delicacies of organic Ufe. Whether 
we cast our thoughts upward into the world of 
the mysteriously great, or downwards into the 
world of the wonderfully small, we are always 
overcome with the feeling of looking into an 
abyss which turns us dizzy. Our perceptions 
and conceptions, our beliefs and our hypotheses 
— by the help of which we seek to understand 
the world rightly — all our ideas of space and 
time, of cause and effect, of atoms and moleculae 
of aether and aether vibrations, of cells and seeds, 
contain, each of them, a whole series of new 
questions. We, shadows of a day, are destined, 
It would appear, to contemplate the universe 
only from that side of it which is, by chance, 
turned towards us, and we are incapable of any 
real survey of the whole. 

But within the limits of the infinitely great, 
and the infinitely little what a rich source of 
mysterious, inscrutable life in all its wealth; 
what a rushing, mighty stream of events! We 
believe that we have investigated to a great 
extent the laws of these occurrences, and 
understand some of them; for, truly, the hu- 
man understanding has penetrated very far in 



8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Its bold spirit of daring. It has shown from 
what elements the starry worlds are built; it 
has penetrated the laws of the tiniest living 
organisms; it has succeeded in deciphering to 
some extent, at least, the history of organic life 
through the stages of its development on our 
earth. Yet, even supposing we had entirely 
completed this work, supposing we possessed 
all knowledge and knew all the laws of nature, 
we should still be confronted by a great and im- 
penetrable problem, the problem of life itself, 
the problem of the concrete and individual 
actuality of this world — that this world is such 
as it is. We believe that we have discovered all 
the laws according to which bodies move and 
revolve in a system; but why there are just 
these bodies of this size, at this distance, revolv- 
ing at this velocity, and arranged in these 
definite systems, we do not know. In all our 
knowledge there remains a final something 
that is impenetrable; we are therefore obliged 
to lift our thoughts to the infinite, and to derive 
the finite from the infinite. And supposing we 
knew, absolutely, all the elements, all the 
foundation stones from which our world was 
constructed, and knew all their qualities and 
powers, yet we should still be face to face with 
this insoluble problem — ^Why are they precisely 



THE QUESTION STATED 9 

these elements and these attributes ? And sup- 
posing we succeeded in expressing the charac- 
teristics of the elements in a definite arithmetical 
scheme according to the weight, number, and 
order of the atoms and moleculae, there would 
still remain the question of why it was just this 
scheme and no other. And if our scientists suc- 
ceeded in arranging all the organisms and 
living things of the earth genealogically, in a 
gigantic table, and in understanding their ori- 
gin according to historic evolution, there would 
yet remain as impenetrable the concrete exist- 
ence of this tree of life which began with the 
simplest cell formations and ended with man. 
Modern biologists are especially interested in 
the fact that every form of organic life, every 
plant, even though it is in conformity with the 
law of its development, has something peculiar, 
individual, incalculable, in it. And it is this 
same riddle that confronts us everywhere, that 
meets us in human life, only with far greater 
potency and distinctness. Every human indi- 
vidual life, however much may be known about 
Its being in conformity with law and evolution, 
has yet at bottom something inexplicable, 
unique, never to be repeated in exactly the 
same form, absolutely impenetrable. 
Thus all existence moves along according to 



10 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

definite laws which we can understand. But 
the fact that we exist here and in this particular 
form ever remains inscrutable and eternally 
mysterious;' it cannot be explained according 
to reason. It is, somehow or other, appointed 
by some power; this enigmatical existence 
which surrounds us has emerged from unat- 
tainable depths, from an unbounded, incalcu- 
lable Will. 

And what are we in the midst of this mys- 
terious reality, with our life and our struggles ? 
What is our meaning, our object in life ? Are 
we merely sparks which fly upwards out of the 
dark night, and pass away again into the dark- 
ness ? And even if we link our existence to 
that of the community, the nation, humanity, 
and try to be content with the contribution of 
our life's work to the common stock of the 
human race, yet we ask ourselves, What is the 
meaning and object of mankind in the mass ? 
Do we really march upwards and onwards in 
our work ? Now and again the clouds appear 
to lighten and we perceive something in the 
course of events that looks like an universal 
plan; but again the heavens are overcast and 
deep mysteries surround us. Tremendous ob- 
stacles to a definite plan; the wholesale squan- 
dering of powers; senseless, harsh, destructive 



THE QUESTION STATED ii 

events, and the powerful intervention of the 
elemental forces of the world are apparent on 
all sides. Is it, indeed, progress or retrogression, 
or from one point of view advance, from another 
descent, and on the whole an aimless oscilla- 
tion ? The strife between the opt mists and the 
pessimists is waged unceasingly, and the more 
profound and thoughtful natures appear to 
ally themselves with the hosts of the latter. 

Let us, for the moment, pass once more from 
the objective world to our own selves. Oh, if 
only we might lead, within the narrow limits of 
our possibilities, a life filled with a purpose! If 
only we could consistently shape our lives as 
the sculptor casts his clay, with a firm hand! 
But how unskilfully as a rule we conduct our 
lives! When we glance back over our life do we 
not recognize our lost opportunities and the 
mistakes which can never be made good ? And 
how cruelly did the rough reality of the world 
around us force its claims upon us! Did not 
many among us sally forth to find something 
truly great to conquer, something truly good, 
and how miserable was the thing that we actu- 
ally found! The stream of life carried us to 
quite a different place on the banks, far below 
the spot where we thought to land. Thus we 
stand in the midst of a great, dismal universe, 



12 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

between two infinities, in the midst of a mani- 
fold life (which ascends from unknown depths) 
and all its problems; we dwell on the boundary 
line of day and night, between birth and death. 

"... We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

And now an anxious question arises within 
us: Is there a final meaning and abiding place 
in our life ? Is our own existence anchored in 
the depth of reality, or are we drifting about 
on the surface of life, like the foam which the 
waves of the ocean toss up ? Are we only like 
falling, fading leaves which after a brief sum- 
mer pass away from the living world to prepare 
the earth below for an eternal continuation of 
the aimless game ? 

We cannot help asking ourselves these ques- 
tions, and longing for something beyond the 
unsatisfying conclusions to which we are led 
by a consideration of the world around us. This 
longing is not a mere idle wish or desire arising 
from our feeling of powerlessness and insig- 
nificance and futility; we are forced to it by an 
inward compulsion, by the feeling of our rela- 
tive greatness, of our inward spiritual superiority 



THE QUESTION STATED 13 

to all the classified and isolated phenomena of 
existence, and we feel that we are more than all 
the things around us which we include in the 
term nature^ that our true self is never quite 
satisfied, but ever stretches forth beyond this 
finite and imperfect existence to something that 
is final and absolute. And the greatness of the 
encompassing universe which crushes and op- 
presses us, which seems to deny all our claims 
to superiority, where is it and how does it come 
to us ? It exists in our own mind, we conceive 
it; where there is no ego it does not exist. It is, 
so to say, the human spirit which creates and 
overcomes this profound, awe-inspiring reality. 
In this insignificant, contemptible human nature 
of ours dwells a will which is able to oppose all 
outward resistance and to pursue its path in 
spite of it — a will that may be crushed yet is 
never entirely destroyed, and is never wholly 
inert when it is a question of what we call the 
good and the true. We cannot put on one side 
"these obstinate questionings," they are an in- 
trinsic part of our life. Very varied, indeed, is 
the form of these questions as asked by the indi- 
vidual, and manifold are the sources from which 
an answer is sought. Some try to shelve them. 
These are the inoffensive, easy-going people. 
They have cast a cursory glance at the riddle of 



14 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

life, but this frightened them, and they turned 
away; they seek to forget it, and to spend 
themselves in frivoHty and amusement and the 
gay dance of life. And they spend themselves 
in the most disastrous sense of the v^ord; they 
deny their true self, do violence to themselves, 
and lose their true nature in the encompassing 
reality v^hich drags them hither and thither 
because they have lost their centre. It need not 
be absorption in the coarse and hollow pleasures 
of daily life; it may, indeed, be absorption in 
what is called work, in manifold activities which 
seem so full of purpose but are really without 
meaning or value, in the eager grubbing for 
earthworms, in the amassing of useless treas- 
ures. Such people have, indeed, only trifled 
with the business of life. Because they were 
not courageous enough to descend into the 
darkness and the depths of existence, and to 
tend the roots of life, they allowed them to 
wither, and so they lead an aimless life, a prey 
to all the chance currents of the moment, with- 
out an object or a support. 

Opposed to these stands another set of 
human beings. They perceive all the harsh- 
ness and the terror of the world around them; 
they long for truth and reality, for a complete, 
perfect life, for ''deep, deep eternity.'' But 



THE QUESTION STATED 15 

they shut themselves off from the one thing 
which can lead them farther in this world — 
that is, from the crushing, overwhelming feeling 
of their own nothingness. They refuse to see 
the chains by which they are bound, and they 
believe in the almighty power of their own ego 
raised to a superhuman degree. Dwelling in 
the presence of death and amid the unsolved 
riddles of the universe, they yet raise the trium- 
phant song of life, and think to find the mean- 
ing of life in this existence which their own en- 
raptured enthusiasm has enriched and height- 
ened in value. And yet how deeply they are to 
be pitied! Their fate forces them continually 
to climb beyond their strength, and to raise 
their voices louder and louder until they only 
utter discordant notes. Solitary they pursue 
their course, like the brilliant meteor which, 
outside the laws of nature, explodes in brilliant 
flashes and leaves behind in the world a dark- 
ness greater than ever. 

And, further, we come to a third group: 
they are too earnest and too thoughtful to pass 
by the riddle of life, too wise and yet too cau- 
tious to squander their powers uselessly. But 
to them, too, is denied the gift of freeing them- 
selves from their own ego and surrendering 
themselves to a higher power. They mask 



i6 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

themselves in the armor of irony and scepticism 
of their own forging; they penetrate deeply into 
the problems of life, but their hypercritical in- 
tellect prevents them from yielding to any deeper 
feeling, their sophistical reasonings make them 
think that perhaps, after all, there is nothing 
serious and important in life, perhaps everything 
is only the confused sport of their heated imag- 
ination. We must not, they seem to say, look 
at things from such a one-sided, serious point of 
view; we must repress our feelings! As they 
stand for pure intellect and keen observation, 
they regard the material world as a varied, de- 
lightful drama, a bubble whose brightly-colored 
glories we admire, well knowing that it soon 
bursts. They feel deeply unhappy and envy 
the simple people to whom life is real and no 
dream, and yet they think themselves far su- 
perior to the older children and fools of the day 
at whom they ironically smile. And to a cer- 
tain extent they enjoy the varied play of their 
own ego. They are voluntary wanderers in the 
desert who lead a life of deliberate barrenness. 

Above these stands another group which we 
will now consider — those who have accepted 
life with resignation. They have given up, once 
for all, the idea of a solution to a problem of 
which they are perfectly conscious. For them 



THE QUESTION STATED 17 

the universe, in its ultimate meaning, is some- 
thing like a machine which pursues its majestic 
course from the unknown Whence to the un- 
known Whither; which acts in complete accord- 
ance with law and purpose, and is absolutely 
indifferent to all individual life, even of the high- 
est kind. They themselves have learnt to acqui- 
esce. This modern feeling is more in accord- 
ance with truth than that of the Stoics, who 
declared, often with exaggerated and false elo- 
quence, that this indifferent attitude towards 
the universe and its laws constituted the indi- 
vidual's highest happiness. We no longer 
maintain that we reach the highest happiness 
by this path; we admit, calmly and with resig- 
nation, that this actual life can never completely 
satisfy our needs, and that there is neither per- 
fect satisfaction nor final meaning in life. It is 
simply a matter of making the best that is pos- 
sible out of this life, and of living in friendliness 
and in sympathy with all mortal beings, and of 
diffusing around us in this dark and cold world 
a little warmth, a little sympathy, a little help, 
and a little love. 

One last group of men remains — those who 
exercise the greatest attraction over our contem- 
poraries. These are they who preach the gospel 
of beauty. They say: Whatever life may be in 



1 8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Its final meaning, whether the universe around 
is horribly cruel and harsh, purposeless and un- 
meaning, all the same we delight in this horrible 
life, for it is beautiful, it is sublime. All its rid- 
dles and confusions only enhance its wonders 
and its sublime flights; everything that is ugly 
and evil and wrong is only the necessary shadow 
against which light and beauty stand out all the 
more clearly. They look upon the great con- 
trasts that exist in life as a delightful iridescence. 
And out of all the diff^erent tones of existence, 
from the dull notes of the depths and the clear 
sounds of the heights, from the full notes and 
the shrill notes, from the chords and the dis- 
cords, there rushes towards them a glorious 
harmony. They throw over the dark clouds of 
reality the rainbow of beauty, they delight in 
the colored reflection, they listen to the delicate 
tones. The subtle vibrations and feelings which 
are revealed in their own souls seem to them 
more important than the rough matter-of-fact 
things of life which only interest commonplace 
minds. They declare that illusion is the final 
reality, and a dream the highest truth; they 
confuse night with day, and plunge with the 
greatest delight into the unreal and the incom- 
prehensible. They can, indeed, address life thus 
in heroic fashion: Strike us with many strokes. 



THE QUESTION STATED 19 

kill us, yet will we love thee, for thou art beau- 
tiful, thou art sublime. 

But journeying along their own road, and 
apart from all those who seek in different ways 
to discover a solution of the riddle of life are 
they who have found the answer of Faith. 

We will hearken to the answer. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ANSWER OF FAITH 

THE foundation: almighty god 

npO believe, to be religious, implies that we 
adopt a definite attitude towards the uni- 
verse around us, one absolutely different from 
the uncertain views that have already been 
mentioned. The man who really believes pene- 
trates, verily, to life's deepest foundations, and 
does not pass them by with indifference. He 
does not put himself in Titanic opposition to 
the world, nor does he indulge in weary scepti- 
cism and passive resignation. Neither, again, 
does he seek to delude himself over the problems 
of life by the illusion of the Beautiful. He ac- 
cepts the universe courageously and reverently. 
He believes that it is a part of an intelligent 
unity, and he finds in it, behind it, and beyond 
it, an absolute something which gives a final 
support to his life. Even more than this, faith 
teaches us that we are related to the profound- 
est reality of existence in the very depth of our 

20 



THE FOUNDATION 21 

being; that we may gain courage and find our 
soul's peace in it, and that we are permitted to 
call it ''Our God." All belief which in the long 
course of history has led mankind onwards, in 
so far as it was really true and living, has striven 
toward this goal, often by many by-paths and 
circuitous ways, and through the lands of 
shadows and of darkness. That of which the 
religions of all ages and nations had but a glim- 
mering, which sounds clearly and unmistakably 
in the announcement of Christ's gospel, fore- 
shadowed by the Old Testament prophets, is 
the fact that the power revealed to us mysteri- 
ously in the world around us is our God. 

The phrase our God has a twofold meaning. 
He is on the one hand our God, who speaks to 
us out of the plenitude of existence, whose 
creatures we are, and before whose wonderful 
and almighty reality we are conscious of our 
own insignificance. On the other hand, He is 
our God to whom we belong, whom we are 
permitted to address as Thou, who draws us to 
Him, and to whom we venture to draw near in 
a perfect confidence which bridges over all dis- 
tance between God and His creatures. In both 
these respects the Christian belief in God is 
simply the clearest expression of ideas which 
have painfully struggled to embody themselves 



22 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

in the long history of religions. Throughout the 
ages the religious life of the nations has oscil- 
lated between two poles: on the one hand, a 
feeling, often amounting to frenzied anguish, of 
the remoteness of the Divine Being; on the other 
hand, a sense of His nearness, which has some- 
times cast respect and reverence behind it. Now 
the one idea was more prominent, now the 
other; danger and narrowness were to be en- 
countered on both sides. In the Christian re- 
ligion, however, both ideas are equally promi- 
nent; the noble and lofty edifice rests on two 
pillars of equal strength. 

God is our God: He is more than we are, and 
different from us. This conception of God is 
clearly seen, even in the lowest stages of re- 
ligious life. The thought of the Godhead fills 
men with feelings of fear, flight, and defence, 
with wild anguish which is capable of the most 
terrible sacrifices. In the old Greek religion 
we have the acknowledgment that ^^the gods are 
mightier than men,^' and the human presumption 
which put itself on an equality with the God- 
head was regarded as the cardinal sin. The 
spiritual import of the old Greek tragedy was 
summed up in this thought: The gods crush 
the pride of men. And how strongly the heroes 
of the Old Testament emphasized this side of 



THE FOUNDATION 23 

their belief! He is the God who rages in the 
tempest and in the darkness of the clouds 
and then vanishes; the terrible, mysterious God, 
who has determined on the annihilation of His 
people, whose day is darkness and corruption, 
whose message a burden which overwhelms the 
soul, whose being is shrouded in mystery, whose 
ways are higher than our ways, and whose 
thoughts are above our thoughts. An entire 
book of the Old Testament is devoted to the 
mysterious, inexplicable God. Every line of 
the Book of Job strikes this note. It is true that 
in the New Testament, in the preaching of 
Jesus of Nazareth, the opposite note is sounded, 
that of the glad tidings of the ever-present God 
who is close to us. Yet the dominant note still 
sounds in unimpaired strength, and gives to 
Jesus's message its keynote and its power. 
The Father of Jesus of Nazareth is also the 
Lord of Heaven and of Earth, the wonderful 
and inconceivably strong God, who permits the 
sun to shine on the good and the evil, and the 
rain to fall on the just and the unjust. He is 
the mysterious and terrible God who cast the 
shadow of night and of darkness over His Elect 
One's life, and permitted it to end on the cross. 
The greatest disciple of the Master proclaimed 
the same God : the source and goal of our life 



24 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

and being, the God who reveals Himself in mys- 
tery, who destroys mankind's ideas of wisdom 
and might with the folly and shame of the cross, 
in whose inscrutable will exist salvation and 
damnation, and in whose hands we are as the 
clay in the hands of the potter. On St. Paul 
was founded the piety of St. Augustine, with its 
fervor for God, so rugged and so austere, and 
its boldness which trampled upon the human 
being's own will. In the background of Luther's 
belief also there stood the hidden, mysterious 
God: "We must fear God above all else." 

We children of a later age are, if we rightly 
understand ourselves and our position, specially 
inchned toward this severe and gloomy view of 
religious life. For our faith tells us that this 
reality, which, incalculable and immeasurable, 
stretches before us in the eternally great and the 
eternally little; this stream of life, with all its 
riddles, is an expression of His being, the work 
of His will. We cannot estimate the Hmits of 
His creative power, nor measure the area of His 
operations. Even if we unfurled all the sails of 
our knowledge, and embarked on the great 
ocean of facts, and if we flew on the wings of 
fancy which carried us aloft to the summits of 
all being, we should not reach the limits where 
the mystery of infinity was revealed. On the 



THE FOUNDATION 25 

contrary, new depths of existence are disclosed 
to us at every advance that we make in our 
knowledge of the material world and its laws. 
Every answer that we find to a question opens 
up a series of new questions; for every prob- 
lem solved many fresh ones arise. The farther 
we wonderingly penetrate, the clearer it becomes 
to us that the world, as we know it, which we 
consciously govern, is only an island in the 
ocean, round which the unfathomable waves of 
Divine life and creation rise and surge. It is not 
a definite unity, a whole; it is merely a section, 
a fragment, and behind this fragment, so far as 
we can comprehend it, there lies hidden the 
fulness of Divine being which is never perfectly 
revealed to us. The higher we strive upward 
and forward toward Him the more He seems to 
withdraw from us. He does not allow us to 
look upon Him face to face, and even the pa- 
triarchs of the Old Testament pronounced with 
foreboding that whosoever looked upon the 
face of God must die. 

Daily He surrounds us in this world of ours 
with mysteries and miracles. We do not mean 
miracles in the extraordinary sense of the word 
which a childish belief assigns to it. But, as we 
have already said, this whole, concrete universe 
by which we are daily surrounded is in itself an 



26 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

insoluble and marvellous miracle. It is true 
that this whole universe is governed by the in- 
violable regularity of law, and that nothing is 
outside its sphere. But to believe that we can 
explain by the term ^^law'^ life in its uniqueness 
and peculiarity is as if we thought we could 
drain the mighty ocean provided we had a large 
enough net. Every hour of real true life that we 
live refutes us with its abundant contents. 
Each new blossoming of an individual human 
life which is unfolded before our eyes in myste- 
rious quietude from out the mysterious deep, 
which, even if it is apparently insignificant, has 
something peculiar to itself which has never 
existed before and will never recur, speaks to 
us clearly of God's world of miracles in which 
we live. 

And now in contrast to this God we human 
beings are a mere nothing, the work of His 
creative power, placed in the universe by that 
power; creatures who take everything and must 
take everything from His hand; bowed in the 
dust before Him, humiliated in the feeling of 
our weakness and insignificance, and of our 
powerless, purposeless will. Only to him who 
can bear with tranquillity the terrible serious- 
ness of these thoughts has the Christian religion 
anything to offer. But to those who can do this 



THE FOUNDATION 27 

It has even more and greater things to reveal. 
These are not confined to an overwhelming 
sense of our pettiness and nothingness and to a 
mere feeling of fear. There are two words 
which absolutely sum up the substance of our be- 
lief — reverence and humility. And reverence 
includes, indeed, fear. Trembling, we stand 
before Almighty God, and we are not ashamed 
of this fear. Terrible is the reality of the living 
God when He comes on the wings of the storm. 
We must fear God above all else. Our faith is 
no weak and sentimental emotion, no mere elo- 
quent declamation concerning the kind God 
who is enthroned above the stars. He must be 
hard, like flint and diamonds; yet He does not 
only inspire anguish and fear, He inspires rever- 
ence also. We may freely offer to this all- 
powerful, wondrous God honor and reverence. 
And feeling thus, our soul soars above the pow- 
erlessness of our own little ego to a joyous, rev- 
erent wonder and an adoration which delights to 
serve; we are carried aloft to the heights of di- 
vine being and divine thoughts of which we 
have a dim foreshadowing. 

Humility, the highest human quality, affirms 
by its self-renunciation and its voluntary, rev- 
erent self-sacrifice the great and sublime reality 
of God and our own insignificance. "Whom 



28 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

have I in heaven but Thee ? And there is none 
upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh 
and my heart faileth: but God is the strength 
of my heart and my portion for ever/' In this 
feeling of humility we are equally far removed 
from the proud and Titanic self-assertion of the 
ego and from all sad and inconsolable resigna- 
tion. Whosoever draws near to God in rever- 
ence and humility draws hidden strength from 
the fountains of His love. Security, joy, and 
power to gain victory encompass his being, and 
*^this universe has become for him a castle in 
which he can dwell securely/' 



CHAPTER III 

THE ANSWER OF FAITH 
GOD AND THE SOUL 

"VJOW we are confronted with another 
^ question: How is it possible in our faith 
to purify and ennoble that sense of sheer fear 
and anguish, that feeling of the transitoriness of 
life, which comes to us in the presence of God's 
almighty being, so as to rise to the feelings of 
reverence and humility? And we answer: We 
can do this because our faith has another side 
to it. Our faith does not merely impress upon 
us the harsh contrasts between the Creator's 
almighty power and the creature's powerless- 
ness. With a great "and nevertheless'' it 
throws a bridge from God to us and from us to 
God. "Nevertheless I am continually with 
thee: Thou hast holden my right hand." Our 
faith tells us that the Almighty God is our God; 
He inclines Himself to us, and we must rise to 
Him. He belongs to us and we to Him, and 
we are permitted to say Thou to the Almighty 
God. 

29 



30 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Here our Christian religion shows, in its per- 
fect expression, a characteristic which is com- 
mon to all rehgious life. The more strange and 
mysterious the higher powers — the gods and the 
Godhead — appeared to man, the stronger in 
most cases was the feeling of a longing to strive 
upward, and the perception of belonging to God. 
And ever stronger grew the conviction that the 
Godhead desires to come into contact with man, 
that He accepts and offers gifts, that He listens 
to the supplications and entreaties of believers, 
that He affords us a final support and ultimate 
protection, that He demands from man the ful- 
filment of holy and inviolable claims, but that 
at the same time He gives a blessed reward. 
And the higher man's life and faith rose the 
more the nations and the generations — ^whilst 
purifying their religion from the material de- 
mands so intimately bound up with it — included 
in their belief in the Godhead their noblest and 
best ideas, their most sacred possessions and 
talents. Thus on the one hand they based on 
the deepest reality those things which they val- 
ued most, whilst their thoughts of the Godhead 
were purified, and ennobled, and filled with 
a precious significance. 

But it is true that here the greatest and most 
essential differences in religions begin. For 



GOD AND THE SOUL 31 

what things has not the race of man in the long 
course of its existence regarded as of the great- 
est value! And now the task is set us of defining 
the peculiar position of our Christian belief in 
God with regard to the various forms assumed 
by the idea of highest value. 

Far removed from the main stream of the 
religions of the nations, the Indian religions 
which dominated Eastern Asia have pursued 
their course. The people of India, pressing 
southward after they crossed the mountains 
and thus separated from the main stream of our 
races which shaped the world's history, fell, after 
their conquest of the inferior original inhabitants, 
into a dreamy, passive state of which history 
gives us no record — a state due to the enerva- 
ting southern climate. Gradually there stole 
over these people a loathing of the practical life 
of the concrete world, and they regarded it as 
their worthiest object to retire from the varied 
life of the world and society into their own self, 
with its peace, and solitude, and rest. But they 
connected their thoughts of God with this idea, 
which they regarded as the noblest thing in life. 
The Godhead is that great calm and rest of the 
One life which lies behind the phenomena of 
this motley world; and this apparently real 
world is only the colored reflection of life, the 



32 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

foam cast up by the waves which ebb and flow 
in the eternal ocean of true being. When the 
individual withdraws from all the varied occu- 
pations of daily life which are so aimless, and, 
therefore, of necessity, so painful; when he ab- 
stains from all definite exercise of his powers of 
will and thought, and absorbs himself in the 
universal Being; he discovers in the depths of his 
own consciousness the divine, universal, illim- 
itable, and indefinable Being. ^^That is reality, 
that is existence, and Thou art reality and life." 
Religion (from this standpoint) is complete 
abnegation of the ego; religion means medita- 
tive absorption in the Divine, entire surrender 
of self in the One and Universal Being. Thus 
there arose the religion which may be described 
as the classical embodiment of real and logical 
Pantheism — Brahminism, with Hinduism its 
corrupt offspring. And when we see here how 
the one factor in religious life, the human ego, 
is put on one side and almost reduced to zero, 
we are not surprised to find that in Buddhism, 
that offshoot of the Indian religion, which later 
on, indeed, was to overshadow a world, the 
other main factor in religion, belief in God, was 
likewise lost; and religion became simply a 
vague longing from out the depths of our neces- 
sarily painful existence for eternal annihilation. 



GOD AND THE SOUL 33 

It is easily to be understood that, owing to the 
ever closer contact that tends to exist between 
nations and civilizations, this religion of Indian 
Pantheism has begun to exercise an influence 
during the last century upon our European and 
American civilization. Now and again this be- 
lief has been dominant in the upper classes of 
our civilization, especially when it was com- 
bined with the glamour of great poetic or musi- 
cal skill. When, however, we consider the mat- 
ter quietly, we cannot believe that a religious 
conception which seriously preaches the anni- 
hilation of all individual and social values would 
ever gain the mastery, or indeed any consid- 
erable footing, in a world where life is lived so 
strenuously yet so wholesomely, where human 
beings are for ever striving upward and feeling 
that they are destined for great tasks, convinced 
that they stand at the beginning of their work 
and not at the end. It may possibly be that 
these ideas have now and again met with pass- 
ing success in periods when there was for the 
time being little activity among certain nations 
and in particular classes. We had experience 
of this in the middle of the last century. It is 
quite possible that owing to too great and ex- 
hausting stress and strain, which destroy our 
nerves, and a too violent hurry and rush, a reac- 



34 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

tion may set in and exhaustion be apparent. 
But, generally speaking, we may say that this 
whole world of ideas will remain remote from 
our life and its characteristics. Even a prophet 
like Tolstoy, with his proclamation of the worth- 
lessness of all that we hold dear in life, is, and 
will ever remain, remote from us; he cannot 
offer us anything final and permanent, what- 
ever else he may have to tell us. At the most 
his preaching can only have significance as a 
corrective; he can warn us against over-valua- 
tion of the earthly goods which we procure for 
ourselves, but he is no leader who conducts us 
to a new life. 

The adherents of this kind of religion and 
religious life will be chiefly found in certain cir- 
cles, by no means very small ones, where people 
do not regard religion seriously, where they de- 
sire and accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment 
and where men and women who have rushed 
through life and exhausted their strength and 
overexcited their nerves turn in the twilight of 
their days to these ideas. Such ideas seem to 
offer them a stimulating and interesting antith- 
esis, they delight in the gay contrast, they 
revel in the thoughts of the nothingness of life, 
the impulse of which they have just felt in all 
the fibres of their being. In the daytime they 



GOD AND THE SOUL 35 

listen to the march of life, in the evening to the 
nocturne of its transitoriness. Such people de- 
sire to rise a little toward the heights, but they 
will not pledge themselves to anything. We will 
leave such circles; no one can think that there is 
anything here that promises good in the future. 
Religion desires and claims man^s whole being, 
and in truth the deeply serious Indian religion 
is far too good to be regarded as a mere play- 
thing. 

The progressive Western peoples, the con- 
quering nations of the earth, have pursued quite 
a different course in their religious life. They 
did not seek God in the twilight, in a dreamy 
dimness; to them faith was ever united with the 
things that they held of highest positive value in 
their life, with everything that led them upward 
and onward beyond material existence. 

To illustrate this, let us consider the highest 
types of Western religion. Zarathustra, the 
prophet of the Persian nation that was striving 
for world dominion, connected the belief in his 
god Ahura Mazda with the idea of human civi- 
lization. He dwelt among and influenced a 
people who were just about to emerge from a 
nomadic and barbaric existence into a civilized 
one, and he gave as the foundation of this en- 
deavor a belief in God which had been revealed 



36 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

to him. He announced to his people that it was 
the will of Ahura Mazda that they should re- 
nounce their nomadic life and adopt the life of 
civihzed society and its ordinances. He who 
builds houses for permanent settlement, who 
engages in agriculture and cattle-rearing, who 
extirpates the dangerous animals, who builds 
bridges and plants trees, who lives peacefully 
and honorably with his neighbor, and who leads 
a holy war against the barbarians is a servant of 
Ahura Mazda. Whosoever abstains from so 
doing is a servant of the devil and his evil hosts. 
In Greece belief in the gods was united with 
the loftier spiritual life of a nation, as was shown 
in the holy war against the barbarians, and, 
above all, in the works of peace. Everything 
that adorned and beautified, established and 
made firm, ennobled and elevated, the life and 
people of the Greek city was done in the name 
of the gods and dedicated to their service. When 
later, owing to the violence of the blows dealt 
out by fate, Greek city life gradually passed 
away, when the twilight of the gods descended 
on the noble forms of the people's faith, the 
wise men — Socrates and Plato and those who 
followed them — rescued what was essential in 
the Greek religion. The noblest men in the 
period when the ancient world was decaying 



GOD AND THE SOUL 37 

and passing away were upheld by the behef 
that behind this material, visible world, with its 
difficulties, dulness, and imperfection, was a 
higher world which struggled for expression 
painfully and in fragmentary fashion in this 
lower existence — the world of the gods, the 
world of the eternal ideas of the Good, the True, 
and the Beautiful. Placed in a world which they 
gave up all claim to rule, which remorselessly 
pursued its own way, such men lifted up their 
eyes longingly to the higher world, the lost home 
of their soul. 

The great prophets of Israel likewise raised 
their belief in the God of their fathers far above 
the region of the actual national life in which 
they exercised an influence, and filled this belief 
with a new and higher significance. To their 
conception God stood before them, prepared in 
mighty anger and harsh indignation to destroy 
the material existence of His people, and before 
whose holy and indomitable will only one thing 
in the world stood firm — right, justice, holiness. 
^'He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; 
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum- 
bly with thy God r' 

From out this world, ever striving upward, 
the gospel, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, 



38 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

soared aloft, and human faith reached its climax 
in a new creative and Divine fiat. Here, on the 
heights, there sounds throughout this striving 
upward a new, solemnly joyous and deeply po- 
tent note. The gospel announces a God who 
seeks and desires above all else the individual 
human soul. It unites in a security and a close- 
ness hitherto unknown belief in God with the 
importance of the individual human life. It is 
the religion of religious individualism raised to 
its highest point. A new world was here re- 
vealed to religious belief. The Persian religion 
of civilization had quickened but little the 
actual individual life, and after the splendid 
life and influence of its founder had passed 
away it soon fell once more into a religion of 
the most wearisome observance, in which the 
ceremonial service stifled all individuality. The 
philosophic religion of the dying classical world 
set a value indeed on the individual, but it 
created no close connection between him and 
the Godhead. For the Godhead became an 
abstract, bloodless phantom; it was hidden 
behind the lofty ideas of the Good, the True, 
and the Beautiful, of harmony and order, and 
no human belief can live on the abstract. The 
vision of the prophets also was directed toward 
the fate of the whole people, of the nation, its 



GOD AND THE SOUL 39 

fall and its rise. Only very softly and timidly 
was the note of religious individualism sounded 
by the greatest of them. And is not the per- 
sonal belief of the pious psalmist overwhelmed 
with the sense of uncertainty, with laments and 
weeping and sighing of all kinds, with a defi- 
ant and wild thirst for revenge, with manifold 
unsolved problems and unbearable burdens ? 
When at last the later Jewish belief rose to the 
thought of a future Hfe which should explain 
the problems of this life, it sank at the same 
time into an impersonal, legal, and ceremonial 
religion, and dragged itself listlessly and lan- 
guidly along the ground. 

But now, with all its strength, the gospel 
proclamation bursts forth with ''God and the 
soul,'' *'For what shall a man be profited if he 
shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his 
life.'^'' As the new religion was concentrated 
and crystallized in the person of an individual 
in such a way that in the religious life which 
was dependent upon it person and idea were 
inseparably united, it naturally addressed itself 
above all to the individual. The gospel puts 
the individual directly under God's eye and 
God's judgment, and withdraws him from the 
protection which encompassed him around 
through his belonging to a nation, a sect, and 



40 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

a religious body. The gospel addresses itself to 
the individual with its claims and promises; it 
gives to the individual the right to decide the 
course of his own life, and puts the choice of 
heaven and hell into his own hands. And, just 
as in the words of the Sermon on the Mount, 
"but I say unto you,'" all the power and signifi- 
cance of the individual in rehgion is clearly 
shown, so in every word the gospel urges per- 
sonal decision and choice. 

"God and the soul,'' we have said, for the 
individual human life was, indeed, of no value 
in itself, but was only of eternal value in so far 
as it had freed itself from its own egoistic ma- 
terial nature, and had found its centre in God, 
and the law of its being in His holy will. Only 
those who are pure of heart are to see God. 

The saying, "Whosoever would save his life 
shall lose it,'' which was originally, perhaps, 
spoken only with actual reference to the avowal 
of faith and to martyrdom, must be taken by us 
in the spirit of the gospel in a wider and deeper 
sense. It means, really, that we must contin- 
ually risk our sensually inclined and mortal life 
in order to win a higher and an eternal one. 

It is in this sense, then, that the gospel 
speaks of God and the individual, personal life. 
It is not life in its unconsciousness, when it is 



GOD AND THE SOUL 41 

absorbed in the universal nature, or life which 
has abandoned its actual positive work and in- 
dulges in sad resignation and the twilight of in- 
activity; rather it means the individual life in 
its greatest energy, in the active exercise of its 
highest powers, in its individuality and unique- 
ness willed by God and ordained in His decree. 
It is the individual life, foreordained from eter- 
nity and working toward eternity, for which 
nothing else can be substituted. 

This essential idea has remained peculiar to 
the Christian belief. At the very beginning of 
its history we are brought face to face with one 
of the most wonderful and unique personalities 
which the world has ever seen — a personality 
which destroys the old world and creates a new 
one; so unique, so individual, that the question 
may be asked in all seriousness whether this 
Paul is really to be considered as a disciple of 
his Master, as he proclaimed himself to be, or 
whether he may not be regarded as the second 
founder of the Christian religion. In any case, 
we see that in this matter we are considering 
there is a close connection with the gospel of 
Jesus of Nazareth. ^^We know that to them 
that love God all things work together for good, 
even to them that are called according to His 
purpose.^' "If God is for us, who is against 



42 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

us?'' How clearly and simply, with what cer- 
tainty and triumph, is the essential idea of the 
new message developed! When we read the 
seventh chapter of Romans we see how the 
new faith deepened and enlarged the human 
soul and its consciousness. Have we ever 
before been given a confession which is so 
profound, so subtle, and so unique in its 
psychology ? 

We continue this line of thought, and a few 
centuries later, we come across a wonderful 
book which opens up new and unheard-of 
paths, which ventures to depict to the outside 
world the inner workings of a human soul, a 
book in which all external events are only of 
value in so far as they affect the inner life, and 
where everything is regarded from the spiritual 
point of view. I refer to St. Augustine's *' Con- 
fessions." No other book throughout the 
earliest and middle ages of the Church has 
shown so clearly the uniqueness and peculiarity 
of the new religion. "God and the soul I desire 
to apprehend. Nothing else } Nothing else 
whatever." It was St. Augustine's "Confes- 
sions" which revealed to the youthful spirit of 
the new nations the rich world of subjectivity 
and the inner spiritual life — those new nations 
which, when they had reached maturity, were 



GOD AND THE SOUL 43 

to be the makers of the history of the Middle 
Ages. Whilst at the Itahan Renaissance the 
soul of man broke away from the idea of a Di- 
vine origin and won a new world by Titanic 
striving and determination, and looked at itself, 
sunned itself — alas! but for a moment — in the 
glory and splendor of its own ego, at the Refor- 
mation the religious ego was once more revealed 
in its divinely derived certainty and in its 
strength rooted in the fulfilment of the Divine 
will. After long struggles in bitter captivity, 
the individual human soul soared to the free- 
dom of the Christian, and now the mountainous 
obstacles which had so hemmed in the stream 
of personal religious life rolled away. But what- 
ever Is wholesome and promising in modern 
life is ultimately to be connected with the free- 
ing of the religious ego accomplished in the 
Reformation, though it may be admitted that it 
was not merely a question of the freeing of the 
will alone, but of its development. If we pur- 
sue this line of inquiry into our own days, we 
see at the end of it the great philosopher on 
whom our knowledge and, indeed, our life to 
a great extent rest, who appears to have re- 
newed his glories in our own age. It was Im- 
manuel Kant who taught us that we should 
seek in vain for a final support for the Absolute 



44 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

and the Eternal in the objective world of things 
limited by time and space, but that we should 
find this Absolute if we looked into the depths 
of our own soul and discovered the self-existent 
law around which the soul revolves. Him we 
may rightly call the sage of the Christian age — 
the philosopher of Protestantism. 

Those spiritual movements which have so 
deeply affected and influenced the history of 
the Christian peoples, although they have re- 
mained to a certain extent apart from the 
main trend of Christian belief in God, cannot 
but acknowledge the influence of its spirit 
and stand in most active relation to it. It is 
true that the Christian religion, like the Indian 
religion, developed the phenomenon of monas- 
ticism, and this monasticism for a time concen- 
trated in itself the best and most distinctively 
progressive forces. But what a difference be- 
tween Western monasticism and that of the 
Hindu religious world! In the latter we have 
a weary retirement of the hunian being into 
himself, and a dreaming away of life in medita- 
tion and emptiness; in the latter we have active 
energy which gained new and valuable things, 
civilized the young barbarian nations, cultivated 
territories, cut down forests, transferred the 
treasures of an old world to a new, and in the 



GOD AND THE SOUL 45 

solitude of retirement delighted in the beauty 
of this natural world. 

If we study modern European pantheism 
(which certainly almost lost sight of the value 
of the individual life in its strong, one-sided 
comprehension of the dominating reality of the 
God-idea), we see what a great contrast there is 
between the miserable, pessimistically resigned 
Indian pantheism and this joyous, courageous 
assertion of the universe with its plenitude and 
order. Let us consider for a moment the math- 
ematical pantheism of Spinoza: To him the in- 
dividual is certainly no more than a number or 
a dot in the vast one and universal existence. 
But still he is a number, a number that stands 
in a particular place, and if it did not stand pre- 
cisely there the whole world would fall to pieces. 
Thus amazed and adoring, admiring and lov- 
ing, the individual raises his eyes to the universe 
and its great and eternally fixed laws — amor dei 
irvtellectualis. By the whole body of Indian 
mystics such sounds would never be heard. 

The same thing is to be observed in the so- 
called revival of Spinozaism in German ideal- 
ism. Here, indeed, spirit and Nature form one 
great unity, and with its aesthetic pantheism 
man threatens to sink into a noble child of 
nature. Niebuhr once called the personages in 



46 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Goethe's " Wahlverwandtschaft'' "innocent ani- 
mals in a menagerie/' But yet how spirituahzed 
is this conception of nature! The whole uni- 
verse is comprehended as a great, purposeful 
evolution, as a power which develops through 
universal growth to ever higher forms, and dis- 
plays the fulness of life in the gradation of 
events which serve a definite purpose. We are, 
therefore, no longer astonished that this con- 
ception of the world which united nature and 
spirit, but laid the emphasis on the spiritual 
aspect of the world, became gradually changed 
in the old age of that great world genius Goethe 
into theism and the personal religion of Chris- 
tian belief. 

Thus the rivulets flow away from the main 
stream of the Christian faith, some, appar- 
ently, to be lost in the sand, some to return to 
it. But the principal stream has ever remained 
the same — faith in the God of our life who 
anchors our being to deepest reality, to Him- 
self. Or, if we look at it from the other side, we 
may say it is belief in a spiritual, personal God. 
Jesus of Nazareth created a clear and illumi- 
nating symbol for this faith when He addressed 
God as " Father.'' He was not the first to strike 
this note; it was sounded before in the Jewish 
as well as in the Greek world of religion. But 



GOD AND THE SOUL 47 

nowhere else do we eet this belief in God the 

O 

Father expressed with such certainty and sim- 
plicity, with such strength and conviction, and 
nowhere else is it so definitely connected with 
the individual life. This behef in God as the 
Father has always remained the leading star of 
the Christian faith. To what heights does this 
belief attain in St. Paul's epistles: '^To us there 
is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, 
and we unto Him.'' With what certainty is this 
belief shown in the simplicity with which all the 
writings of the New Testament and those like- 
wise of early Christian days speak of this God! 
We need only to compare this calmness and 
simplicity with the false and forced pathos of 
later Jewish Hterature, which lavished attributes 
of all kinds on God. 

It is true that there have always been times 
in the history of Christendom when the strong 
personal belief in God threatened to disappear. 
Already in the first centuries it was threatened 
with extinction in the confused mass of specu- 
lations concerning the triune God, the con- 
substantiality of the Father and the Son, and 
the two natures of the God-man. In Eastern 
Christendom, indeed, personal belief in God 
has been partly lost, but in the West springs 
of mysterious depths were once more revealed. 



48 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Through all the abstractions and sophistries 
of speculation, through all the forms of dogma, 
the human soul struggled toward the living, 
personal God whom it could and might address 
as "Thou/' "Thou hast made us unto Thy- 
self, and our heart is restless until it rests in 
Thee/' "Oh! for Thy mercies' sake, tell me, 
O Lord my God, what Thou art unto me. Say 
unto my soul, ^I am thy salvation.' So speak 
that I may hear." And these notes of Augus- 
tinian piety are sounded in spite of the Papacy 
and the worldliness of the Church and its organ- 
ization, in spite of scholasticism and the ossifi- 
cation of the Christian religion into a system 
throughout the Middle Ages, until with the 
Reformation and Martin Luther this mighty 
Thou rises once more to the living God. 

This acknowledgment of God as a Father 
may seem specially difficult to us children of 
to-day, for modern natural science has shown 
us God's workings and Being in an infinity and 
a sublimity which dazzle us; and our thought, 
in so far as it is religious, urges us forward in the 
direction of comprehending God as an absolute 
Being far surpassing anything that is finite and 
individual. Yet it is required of us that we also 
shall venture to address the living God as 
"Thou." One thing we must make perfectly 



GOD AND THE SOUL 49 

clear to ourselves: When we speak of God as a 
person and a spirit, when we term Him the 
Father of our individual life, it must not be 
thought that we have thereby given an adequate 
theoretical account of God's nature. We know 
only too well that all our language about His 
inscrutable nature remains mere stammering 
and faltering, an attempt to demonstrate in 
picture and symbol the impalpable and the in- 
tangible. On the other hand, we know equally 
well that a purely abstract idea of God will 
never lead man to Him, and that picture and 
symbol are the only things, and the most precious 
things, that we possess, and can never be re- 
placed by or resolved into pure thought. The 
symbol of God the Father which our faith gives 
us teaches that God's deepest and most mys- 
terious being is to be found in what we call per- 
sonality and spirit — perhaps, indeed, far beyond 
these, but certainly not in the direction of a 
natural being that lacks personality. When we 
call God the Father we wish to express the idea 
that in this concrete Being there rules a strength 
and a might which determine and affirm our 
personal life so far as it is truly worthy. But it 
always is and remains a daring act of our faith, 
transcending all knowledge, when, in spite of 
the distance between us and God, we address 



50 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

the Almighty as Thou and pray to Him as 
"our Father in heaven/^ 

And now we will combine both aspects of our 
faith. Our faith shows us the remote, veiled 
God and the revealed God, ever near us; it 
permits us to say to the all-powerful God, be- 
fore whom our inmost being trembles, ^^ And yet 
we belong to Thee,'^ and transforms our trem- 
bling fear and anguish into reverence, humility, 
and joyous surrender. And, on the other hand, 
it prevents us from approaching God's presence 
carelessly and presumptuously, and saying the 
Lord's Prayer as if it were a natural, self-evi- 
dent truth. Thus our faith becomes a blessed 
miracle and a mystery, and with the early 
Christians we acknowledge both when we say, 
*' I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker 
of heaven and earth,'* 



CHAPTER IV 

DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH 
PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 

T^EPENDENCE on God and confidence in 
^^^ His personal care for us are intimately 
bound up in our belief in the all-powerful God 
as the God of our life. This belief is announced 
in the gospel with absolute boldness. The indi- 
vidual human being, so far as he turns toward 
the higher life within himself, so far as he up- 
lifts his soul to God, is of more value than any- 
thing around him in Nature; of more value than 
the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, and all 
the glories of Nature which God^s goodness so 
lavishly spreads around him, and he is quite 
sure of his Father's love and care. ^'We know 
that to them that love God all things work to- 
gether for good.'' Our faith here touches a 
depth and a mysteriousness before which the 
reflective intellect of man must tremble. It re- 
quires our utmost religious energy to live truly 
in this confidence in the personal providence of 

51 



52 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

God. Wherever people have lost their feeling 
for the simple truths of religion in the cobwebs 
of human wisdom and artificial dogma they 
have dared to disregard the belief in Divine 
Providence, in the Christian ''Trust in the 
Lord^^ as something of very little specific value. 
Those who do this know what they are doing. 
One thing only may be said in their excuse: 
that in an age when men's thoughts were nar- 
row and limited, and little reverence was felt 
for the mighty and mysterious reality of our 
own existence, the belief in a divine Providence 
was calmly accepted as being a self-evident fact 
attainable without difiiculty by the common- 
sense of mankind. How far removed are these 
times and these ideas from us children of a later 
day! 

There is no point which is more open to 
doubt than this concerning belief in a Divine 
Providence and care for the individual being. 
We must guard ourselves with all our strength 
against these doubts which assail us on all sides. 
And this we can do if we observe two things: 
First of all, we must look into our own personal 
life; we must shut our eyes to the terrible reality 
around us, with all its problems and inscrutable 
mysteries. We are not called upon to solve all 
these problems and to penetrate these mys- 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 53 

teries, ^'to digest the universe metaphorically.'' 
We are here to find out a way and a path for 
ourselves amid the great inscrutability of exist- 
ence, to discover pillars to which we can cling. 
And, further, a second thing is to be noticed: 
We must not, as so often happens, compare our 
happiness and unhappiness and strike the bal- 
ance between them. Who says that we are here 
to be happy ? But we are certainly here to know 
and do the work which life has assigned to us, 
to stand firm at the post to which we are ap- 
pointed, to develop the higher powers of our 
own life, to find God, and in Him the object, 
the measure, and the meaning of our own life. 
And when we thus acknowledge the object of 
our existence, we shall ask ourselves for the 
first time whether there is not to be recognized 
in the guiding of our life a friendly, fatherly 
Power which surrounds us everywhere with 
His care, and draws us to our life's goal, not 
by harsh, legal compulsion, but by loving 
promises. 

When, trembling and hesitating, you take the 
first step, you find that life and the world around 
you begin to grow bright. And in what you 
have until now called the blind caprice and 
arbitrariness of fate or sport of chance, in the 
important things as in the insignificant, in the 



54 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

bliss of happiness and in the bitter, heart-break- 
ing, agonizing moments of your Hfe, in the light 
of clear day and in the darkness of anguish and 
misery, you will seek to grasp the hand of God, 
who bears and supports your Hfe. He speaks 
to you; question Him, pay heed, listen, hear. 
Softly the voice speaks to you out of the eternal 
heights, like the voice of a mother calling to her 
child who has wandered away in the wood. 
Louder and more distinctly, more and more 
frequently it speaks to you, and seldom does it 
leave you, even in the hurry and bustle of every- 
day life. Undreamt of powers descend upon 
you. That terrible feeling of oppression which 
burdened your soul, the fear of all that can and 
may happen in this strange life of ours, gradu- 
ally disappears. Doubt and uncertainty begin 
to pass away; step by step at first we gropingly 
feel our way, but ever more and more clearly 
our path in life is revealed to us. And now 
there begins to awaken in our heart that rest 
and holy tranquillity which is never disturbed 
by disappointments or adversity. Even heavy 
misfortune no longer appears as a fate which 
overwhelms us, but as a task which obliges us to 
develop new powers; for all burdens strengthen 
the powers of our life, and tribulations stimu- 
late our energies. And when through the heavy 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 55 

blows of fate God takes away our strength, bars 
our way and shuts the door, we must watch to 
see if new paths are not revealed, new doors 
opened, and we must learn to say with St. 
Paul, ''For when I am weak then am I strong." 
Thus we are in agreement with the following 
pious confession: ''There are moments in each 
man's life when he is conscious of a design 
which runs through his whole existence, a plan 
which he has not designed and does not com- 
plete, the thought of which delights him as 
much as if he had planned it out himself, and 
the execution of which seems to bring him 
blessings and peculiar advantages, though his 
own hands have not carried it out. He is free, 
as the chess-player is free to make his moves, 
but at the same time he is not his own master 
any more than the chess-player who is forced to 
move by a superior opponent. He is conscious 
that the end of the game will not be checkmate 
for him, but victory through defeat, and the 
nearer this end draws the more impatiently he 
awaits it, rejoicing in the will, scarcely to be 
misunderstood any longer, of Him who has 
forced free man into a position where the high- 
est freedom will be found, because unlimited 
opportunity for the development and display of 
his capacities will be granted him" (Lagarde). 



56 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

This belief in the personal God who guards 
our life, so far as it really deserves to be called 
life, is, essentially, belief in a wonderful God 
who works miracles. We touch here the very 
kernel of the Christian belief in miracles; we 
see the abiding truth of the saying, ''A miracle 
is the best-beloved child of faith/' 

Hence our faith denies a conception of the 
world in which the world would resemble an 
artificially contrived machine regulated in every 
separate part, which would revolve in accord- 
ance with law after it had received the first im- 
pulse from the Almighty. For that would be, 
above all else, a universe where belief in a per- 
sonal Providence could not thrive. On the 
contrary, we believe that our God is present in 
all that happens in the world, that He is always 
at work. Out of the richness and depths of His 
being new powers and new manifestations con- 
tinually stream into the ever-growing creation, 
and human individualities are the centres of His 
creating and His moving power so far as they 
rise from the lower material life toward the 
height of His being and nature. 

On the other hand, our belief in no wise de- 
mands what is called the abrogation, violation, 
and alteration of the course of nature. We do 
not need this proof of the reality and power of 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 57 

our God, and, indeed, we consider it a sign of 
want of faith to seek for events in the world 
which may show clearly to the gross senses of 
man and to his intellect, with its rationalistic 
conceptions, that here there is an undeniable 
interposition of Almighty God. 

On the contrary, it is an essential part of our 
faith in the self-revealed God who is ever near 
to us that He should keep within the ordinances 
which He Himself has decreed. We believe 
God to be a God of law and order, and not of 
mere caprice and arbitrary will. We believe in 
the God of goodness and loving-kindness, who 
has granted us to apprehend, at least in part, the 
laws and regulations of His operations, who 
gave us understanding, and does not arbitrarily 
mock at it. We know our God desires that we 
should dwell in confidence on the sure founda- 
tion of a known and controlled reality — however 
small may be the part of this reality known to 
us — and that we should not be kept in anguish 
and apprehension by a crushing and capricious 
despotism. Further, we do not fear that be- 
cause we possess knowledge, which is after all 
but fragmentary, and power to rise to a sense of 
security and to a control of Nature, at best but 
partial, we shall thereby lose our belief in the 
greatness and inscrutability of our God and our 



58 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

reverence for Him. Our faith only claims that, 
humanly speaking, our God knows a thousand 
ways and means within the limits of the given 
laws, ordinances, and connections of approach- 
ing the individual, surrounding him with His 
goodness and care, uplifting him to the com- 
munity of spirits whose spiritual link He is, and 
raising him toward Himself. Our faith claims 
that this reality, in the deepest sense of the 
word, is not a law which crushes us, but Divine 
will, Divine goodness. It is Divine will within 
the law. It is Divine will which does not, noisily 
and with uproar, destroy all opposition; but 
gently, noiselessly, softly, and wisely, visible 
only to the eye of the believer, it operates in the 
affairs of the world. 

When we want to form a picture, a symbol of 
Divine activity, we think of a great, dominating, 
human personality. What is the secret of that 
charm, the influence of which almost approaches 
omnipotence ? It is not to be found in the vio- 
lent destruction of all obstacles, in the assertion 
of power. It is quite otherwise. We believe 
that this personality guides and controls from 
within, as it were. It seems as if it is to be 
found again and again guiding events and 
human beings. It does not compel from with- 
out; it works with the very essence of things. 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 59 

The irresistible nature of its influence rests upon 
this fact that everything appears to happen 
spontaneously, to take place owing to its own 
impulse. Thus such a man expresses what the 
world around is already trying to achieve, 
realizes the inarticulate longings of men, and 
embodies their unconscious strivings and ten- 
dencies. High on his shoulders he carries his 
race and his age, and, swiftly carried along 
by the shouts of enthusiasm, he reaches his 
goal. 

Again let us consider the influence of a real 
personality in narrower circumstances. What 
a wonderful, marvellous spectacle it is! We 
may, perhaps, be able to guess at his goal, but 
we shall not be able to foresee the path by which 
it is reached. Where dizzy and steep precipices 
stand between him and his goal, and where the 
eyes of the average man would see no way across, 
he finds one and traverses it safely. Confidently 
and with undimmed vision he finds out of the 
thousand possible ways just the one which 
leads to his goal. 

If we once have the courage to think of God's 
being and operations as of the nature of per- 
sonality transfigured, we shall then understand 
something of the mystery; we shall begin to 
see how God works within the law in things 



6o FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

and with things, yet in such a way that, finally, 
it is not the law with its mechanical necessity 
that is the moving impulse, but the living God, 
to whom every necessity of the law becomes 
but a means to His end. 

Prayer corresponds in the practical conduct 
of our religious life with the belief in the per- 
sonal providence of God. Christianity is the 
religion of prayer; prayer is its crown and its 
pearl. The central idea of Indian piety is 
meditation, the absorption of the individual in 
the life-spirit, the experience of identity with 
the universality and oneness of the Godhead. 
Our faith in personal providence breathes and 
lives in prayer in which the reality that sustains 
us and surrounds us with its goodness is united 
with a person whom we can address as ^^Thou.'* 
Here prayer is the only means of intercourse. 
Everything else that was of significance in the 
other religions — sacrifice and worship, oracles, 
ceremonies, and observances — no longer plays 
a part in the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Sac- 
ramental observances also were unknown to 
Jesus; He did not institute baptism in His life- 
time, and it is merely tradition that ascribes its 
institution to the risen Lord. He could hardly 
have thought of the feast of the Last Supper as 
an act to be repeated. But the Gospels tell us 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 6i 

how He Himself prayed, how He went up into 
the mountain alone to converse in solitude with 
His heavenly Father, and, above all, they tell us 
how Jesus taught His disciples to pray. The 
most precious legacy that He bequeathed to His 
followers, a bond of union to-day and in days to 
come, which may be rightly called the sole and 
genuine symbol of the Christian Faith for all 
ages and all generations, is the Lord's Prayer; 
and wherever Christianity has deliberated about 
itself, stripped off its ancient vestments and 
destroyed old worn-out forms, the simple, per- 
sonal prayer has again become the palladium of 
our religion. 

But what is prayer ? It is, when we compre- 
hend it in its deepest and most peculiar signifi- 
cance, a dialogue between our innermost self 
and Almighty God, a real and true experience. 
It is an uplifting of the human soul to the 
highest reality, God condescending and bend- 
ing toward the individual human soul. It is 
a mystery of whose deepest and innermost 
truth and splendor we are, perhaps, only fully 
conscious at rare moments in our lives. 

It is of the highest importance to maintain 
this point of view in order to meet an objection 
which is often raised far too rashly and capri- 
ciously when the question of prayer is consid- 



62 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

ered. Have we the right, and is it possible, to 
pray for this and that — to pray that definite 
outward events and incidents should come to 
pass ? It is here that disputes and scepticism 
come in which strike at the most important and 
holiest part of our religious life, and shake its 
very foundations. For an apologetic, wrongly 
applied, has directed its attention to this very 
point, and feels obliged to assert that the course 
of events and outward affairs is indeed altered 
through prayer, otherwise prayer would really 
effect nothing, and it would simply be mere 
feeling and declamation. 

We must try to get rid of this doubt to which 
an over-zealous faith has exposed prayer; we 
must establish the most important fact in our 
religious life on a perfectly sure foundation. 
Let us at once admit quite frankly that nothing 
in the outside material world will be altered 
through our prayer, that nothing will happen 
that would not have happened without our 
prayer. How then do matters stand ? In spite 
of this, prayer remains an absolutely real and 
efficacious fact. Everything around us may, 
indeed, remain unchanged, but we ourselves, at 
any rate, are changed by prayer. And this sig- 
nifies a very great deal. For God^s personal 
care for us, in which we believe, would be per- 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 63 

fectly ineffectual if we individuals did not under- 
stand and comprehend it, if we did not rightly 
interpret and understand the guidance which 
God brings to our life, if we went to the left 
when God commanded us to go to the right. 
Prayer, then, may be regarded above all else as 
listening to His will which is revealed to us as 
the personal appropriation of His providence. 
Only through prayer does the actual world with 
which God surrounds us become, as it were, 
clear to us. Chance is revealed as God's own 
design, and the apparently meaningless in life 
becomes full of meaning. Prayer and Divine 
Providence are the two closely connected poles 
of our higher life dedicated to God, and one 
without the other is inconceivable. Thus prayer 
becomes a very serious and a very real thing. 
Prayer means that we penetrate through the 
outward appearances of things to the truth and 
to the real meaning of our life which springs 
from God. To pray means to live truly, but it 
also means '^to stand in judgment of ourselves,'' 
to place ourselves with all our wilfulness and 
our perversity before God, to abjure the foolish- 
ness and the selfish desires of our lower self. 
Thus in this universal and broad sense of the 
word prayer becomes a task of our life which 
we must never neglect. To pray is to lead our 



64 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

life under God's eyes and to accept our life 
from His hands. It is in this sense that the 
New Testament speaks of "Prayer without 
ceasing.'' 

If our life is based on this foundation, this 
attitude will again and again be concentrated 
in definite prayers for this and that. We shall 
again and again think and feel that a definite 
course of events may be of the utmost impor- 
tance for our inward, higher life — perhaps, in- 
deed, according to our judgment, necessary for 
its successful development. Now, so our faith 
tells us, we are not forbidden to ask God con- 
cerning the shaping of outward events and oc- 
currences, and in such cases there is no absolute 
and permanent dividing line between the im- 
portant and the unimportant, the inward life 
and outward facts. But, indeed, at each special 
prayer we tell ourselves that God knows what 
we need before we ask Him, and gives according 
to His judgment; and to every such prayer we 
add what Jesus taught us in the darkest hour 
of His life, "Not my will, but Thine be done." 
And so our prayer of entreaty is but the expres- 
sion and the vivid, intuitive feeling that in a par- 
ticular case we receive our whole life from God's 
hands. 

Prayer and Divine Providence stand together 



PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 65 

as ebb and flow; our selfish obstinacy must 
dwindle away, the natural man must be checked, 
so that the eternal will of God by which He 
encompasses our whole being may stream in 
upon us. 



CHAPTER V 

DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH 
GOD AND THE GOOD 

TT is an essential characteristic of our belief 
^ that it is bound up with the individual life, 
so far as this is concerned with God and the 
higher things of life. When we ask what the 
important things in life are, we at once admit 
that moral good occupies the first and the most 
conspicuous place among them. Moral good 
and the value of the individual Hfe are two 
things which are most intimately connected. 

Let us consider in relation to this the value 
of human civilization. No one can deny that 
civilization furnishes us with valuable things 
and possessions, but they are and remain physi- 
cal, material. Civilization merely procures for 
us the means and the material for the building 
up of our personal life; it takes man to the 
point where the work of his own life must begin. 
Hence this civilization may become an unbear- 
able burden, when, owing to the enormous bulk 

66 



GOD AND THE GOOD 67 

of its wealth and the breathlessness of its 
activity, it deprives the individual of the energy 
to lead his own life according to the law of his 
own nature. It may become a fatal danger, for 
it threatens to reduce the individual to a mere 
tool, to a tiny wheel in the enormous machine 
which it drives. When this happens we hear 
from time to time the despairing cry of man, 
*'Away with civilization, let us return to the 
simplicity and plainness of Nature.'' But, in 
truth, to follow this cry would be to add a 
second mistake to the first. It is as difficult for 
man to dispense with civilization as to bear it. 
Civilization and individual personality are two 
powers which, forever in serious conflict, are 
yet dependent on each other. 

Let us consider, further, those things con- 
nected with human society which are of higher 
value than civilization. We will first of all take 
law. Law has certainly a value which enters 
very deeply into the moral and religious life, 
but it must keep in its right place according to 
its value. The history of religion shows us 
clearly that a too close connection between re- 
ligion and law injures both. During long ages, 
religion, through the power of its holy tradition, 
has burdened the law with foreign ingredients, 
whilst religion has suffered deeply by allowing 



68 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

legal conceptions to predominate. All specifi- 
cally legal conceptions when applied to religion 
have always been harmful to it. For law, in 
accordance with its very nature, acts in the 
region of the impersonal, or, at any rate, remote 
from the personal. It has always striven to find 
and to establish rules and regulations which are 
legally absolute, universally binding, and only 
to be enforced by compulsion. It gives to human 
life in society its proper foundation, and thereby 
helps toward the successful development of the 
higher things in human life, but it must not be 
confused with these higher things. 

Then who would forego the mighty value of 
wisdom and knowledge and truth ? Woe to the 
religion which stifles the search for truth ! Woe 
to the faith which shuts out free thought and 
investigation! According to our faith we are 
to worship God in spirit and in truth. It is, 
however, an old saying that has almost become 
stereotyped, that piety and faith are not by any 
means knowledge and understanding. That is 
quite true; all real knowledge and understand- 
ing ceases just at the point which our faith tells 
us is the highest point. It ceases when we come 
to the individual life and personality. Knowl- 
edge extends to the universal, to the investiga- 
tion of necessary relations and laws; the final 



GOD AND THE GOOD 69 

living thing which is evolved is and remains 
eternally mysterious and incomprehensible. If 
it v^ere to be comprehended by knowledge, it 
would no longer be life. The man who devotes 
himself to knowledge and understanding in a 
spirit of truth and single-mindedness must sur- 
render his own life in this work of his; he must 
be "objective/' and allow all kinds of things, 
people, and facts, to speak for themselves, he 
must be prepared to put on one side continually 
his wishes and hopes and his dislikes and his 
likes. In the building up of our inner personal 
life knowledge has a critical but not a creative 
value. 

And lastly there is the world of the Beautiful. 
Manifold are the lines which cross and intersect 
each other and join art and religion. And in 
this mutual connection each has helped the 
other, provided that each has remained true to 
its own nature, and has not overstepped the 
dividing lines, often so delicate. But in accord- 
ance with their nature, art and aesthetic pleasure 
lead to the opposite regions from those in which 
the life of personal belief breathes and flour- 
ishes. They take us to the regions where our 
personal existence is brought into close union 
with the world of nature; they extend our ego, 
so that it beats in sympathy with the pain and 



70 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

joy of the universe surrounding us, and oscillates 
in harmony with the rhythm of the great uni- 
versal life that pulsates around us. 

• ••••••• 

'^ Spirit sublime, didst freely give me all — 

• ••••••• 

This glorious Nature thou didst for my kingdom give, 

• ••••••• 

deep within her breast to read 
As in the bosom of a friend, didst grant me. 
Thou leadest past mine eyes the long array 
Of living things, mak'st known to me my brethren, 
Within the silent copse, the air, the water. 
When in the wood the tempest roars and creaks, 

• ••••••• 

Then to the sheltering cave dost lead me, then 

Me to myself dost show." 

Along this path must the human being jour- 
ney v^hen he strives after the higher things of 
life. If our faith reveals to us the deep abysses 
of our existence, presses us to a decision, urges 
us upward and forward, and places before us 
the Divine thou shalt, and thou shalt noty art 
shows us a world in harmony and union, or in 
the bewitching beauty of greatness and sub- 
limity. In the beautiful semblance and in the 
illusions of fancy it foreshadows for us the 
deeper relations of reality and a higher har- 



GOD AND THE GOOD 71 

mony of life, of which our faith speaks hope- 
fully, as of a future city and an eternal world. 
Herein lies the ultimate possibility of an alli- 
ance between religion and art and a furtherance 
of each other's aims. But the difference and 
partial opposition still remain. Faith must not 
bind itself too closely with an earthly power 
which consciously builds upon the beautiful 
appearance of things; faith must accept this 
world as it actually is, must put up with circum- 
stances as they exist in this imperfect and in- 
explicable universe. History teaches that art, 
seemingly in union with religion, again and 
again became "the betrayer of religion." 

Thus the ideal of moral good still remains 
the most faithful companion of faith. It has 
become a familiar thought to us, children of a 
later day, that the value, strength, and perma- 
nence of the individual life are best secured in 
morality and its claims. Here, and here alone, 
the individual life finds an absolute and final 
anchorage. Here we have a power that is equal 
to all the opposing forces of outward circum- 
stances, a miracle that is more astonishing and 
more profound than anything in the natural 
world around us. In the command thou shalty 
which rules our behavior and our acts, we pos- 
sess a bulwark and a shield which screen and 



72 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

guard us against everything in the whole world. 
For whilst we perceive everywhere in Nature 
the ebb and flow of things, that command of 
thou shah urges us forward, makes us conscious 
of growth from a lower to a higher stage, and 
indicates that there is likewise a similar steady 
growth in the mighty reality around us. 

But, on the other hand, morality is meant to 
be perfected through faith. By itself it would 
ever remain a fragment, a riddle, an unendura- 
ble, aimless burden. Who are we men, impris- 
oned and conditioned everywhere in space and 
time by the iron laws of existence, and placed 
in an infinite world whose depths we cannot 
sound, much less govern — ^who, I say, are we 
men that we should arrive at the belief that we 
possess within ourselves a final, eternal, invio- 
lable pattern, an absolute law of our being, and 
the capacity freely to shape our own life ? Like 
the waves which wash against the rock and 
crumble it to pieces, these doubts, ever return- 
ing, assail the only thing in our life that is fixed 
and certain. And these would destroy the rock 
(and have already destroyed it almost every- 
where) if faith did not approach morality and 
say to us, "You are not the sport of natural 
law, you stand in close connection with the deep- 
est spiritual reality. What you feel to be the law 



GOD AND THE GOOD 73 

of your existence and the higher Hfe within you 
is the expression of the will of this reality which 
forces itself on you; it is the voice of your God, 
and the law through which He leads us all to 
the development of our higher self/' 

It is a characteristic of our Christian religion 
that it unites in the simplest fashion piety freed 
from everything that is non-essential, and moral 
good purified of all deformities. Jesus of Naz- 
areth gave to His God and Father a title of 
honor which was not to be shared with any one: 
^^None is good, save One, even God." God is 
good, and he who desires to find God must 
seek Him in the good. 

But now the questions which arise urge us on. 
If, then, the Christian belief regards God and 
moral good as one, what is this moral good, 
what is its meaning ? We reply with one word, 
"Love.'' "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." 

Love — at first sight there seems very little 
that is new and original to be said about it. 
We must, however, comprehend it very pre- 
cisely, and consider it from the point of view 
of the history of religion. 

Love occupied a very prominent position 
in the ethic of Brahminism and Buddhism. 
"Everything that we do in this life to gain 



74 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

religious desert is not worth a sixteenth of the 
value of love," so Indian piety asserts! But the 
meaning is there quite different from our defini- 
tion. To us love means a sympathetic active 
will toward and with another. To us love is 
trust and delight in something of incomparable 
value which we find in another's life. In the 
Indian ethic love is based upon compassion; 
to love means to sympathize with another's suf- 
ferings, to help to bear his burdens, to suffer 
with him, for all individual Hfe is necessarily 
painful, purposeless, meaningless. Individual 
beings, having all to bear the common burden 
of existence, must unite in sympathy which 
binds the sufferers together. There is in all this 
no common purpose and, pressing forward and 
upward, no common aim; at its best it is a 
common desire for the dissolution or annihila- 
tion of the individual existence and its suffer- 
ings — that is to say, there is a will which, in- 
stead of becoming stronger and more powerful, 
and lending the individual wings wherewith to 
rise, grows ever weaker and weaker and finally 
sinks into nothingness. 

The word love confronts us, likewise, in the 
lofty civilization of the Greek world; and here 
the word has a full and vigorous sound, a char- 
acteristic which is directly opposed to the ideal 



GOD AND THE GOOD 75 

of love described above, for its roots are fixed 
only too firmly in material, concrete existence. 
Love is here the higher, purer, and nobler 
brother of sensual love and natural desire. 
Love, as it streams out toward us in Plato's 
symposium in the "Phaedrus'' is friendship, the 
sympathy of affinities, the rushing together of 
kindred souls. Love is the very flower of life 
which it fills with intoxicating fragrance; it is 
the harmony of spirits, not without a touch of 
sensual feeling, the sensual perceptions lending 
strength and intensity to the harmony, while the 
harmony ennobles and consecrates the sensual 
perceptions. To this genuinely Hellenic con- 
ception of love and friendship there was added 
in the later Hellenic philosophy a more humane 
and cosmopolitan conception, the feeling of a 
duty toward every one, toward even slaves and 
barbarians; a perception of the solidarity of 
the whole human race which derived its origin 
from the same mighty Power and was subject 
to the same laws of existence. But these new 
thoughts and conceptions lacked, to a very con- 
siderable degree, the strength by which the old 
ideas had taken possession of the hearts of the 
Greeks. They rose to no lofty heights, they did 
not inspire great deeds; there was too much 
mere reflection and declamatory pathos. 



76 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

Let us carry the analysis farther and see what 
love meant in the Old Testament. Here we 
find indeed the text, ^^Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself/^ but at the same time it is 
clear that this command was at first limited to 
fellow-countrymen, and that love rested on the 
basis of natural sympathy and nationality. 
Only very gradually did there enter into later 
Judaism the thought of the solidarity of all 
mankind, and man was put almost on a level 
with a compatriot. I say almost on a level, for 
the above-mentioned feeling of national obliga- 
tion was never really completely overcome. It 
is only in the gospel that we get the final and 
real freedom; it was accomplished quietly; the 
old forms were not destroyed utterly, but under- 
mined. And we know how powerful these were, 
for we see how Jesus the Deliverer had to wrestle 
with the old ideas in His own soul. It is, never- 
theless, a fact that in the gospel of Jesus and 
His personality a new and higher ideal of life 
was given to mankind, which united man and 
man leaped over the boundaries of all nation- 
alities. A generation later St. Paul announced 
triumphantly the breaking down of all these bar- 
riers and the unification of mankind in Chris- 
tianity. 

In truth a great abyss yawns between Jesus's 



GOD AND THE GOOD 77 

gospel of love and the conception held by the 
Pharisees of later Judaism, the roots of which 
reach far back to the Old Testament. The con- 
tradiction was felt instinctively on both sides. 
On the one hand the pious among the people 
did not understand Jesus's work of love. They 
saw in Him an unpractical and even, perhaps, 
a dangerous philanthropist. ''He eats with 
publicans and sinners." On the other hand — 
however much it may be disputed — it is prob- 
able that in the Parable of the Prodigal Son 
Jesus expressed this antithesis. The elder 
brother, his deepest feeling offended and 
wounded in his zeal for justice and duty, who 
stands in such perplexity before the boundless 
love of the father for the prodigal son, was 
a symbol to Jesus of the correct society of the 
pious of His age. What was the difference be- 
tween Jesus and His contemporaries ? To the 
Pharisees love signified something quite other- 
wise from what it did to Him. To them it 
meant doing what was right and straightfor- 
ward, doing what another can rightly demand 
of us, not doing what we should not like another 
to do to us. The fulfilment of duties, reasona- 
bleness, justice — these are the pillars of the 
Pharisaic system of ethics. 
The gospel means much more than this; it 



78 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

desires the text, '' Love thy neighbor as thyself, '' 
to be taken quite Hterally. ''As thyself — this 
means that we are to surround our neighbor, 
our fellow-man, with the same warmth and the 
deep sympathy which we give to ourselves. To 
love one's neighbor does not mean merely to give 
him what belongs to him by right and equity, as 
if justice and equity are the only points of view 
from which I contemplate myself. To love 
one's neighbor means not merely to further his 
aims, to make them one's own; it means to feel 
joy in intercourse with him, and by so doing to 
reach in this common life a truer, more real, 
and higher life than if we stood isolated. To 
love one's neighbor, one's fellow-man — even if 
we have no personal sympathy with him — not as 
our fellow-sufferer in the universal, inevitable 
wretchedness, but as a fighter and ally in the 
struggle for the highest things in life — that is 
something of what the gospel means when it 
demands love of its followers. 

Is, then, this demand reasonable, and is its 
fulfilment possible ? The coolly reasoning, com- 
mon-sense intellect answers "'No," a thousand 
times over. It judges that such love is impos- 
sible, or only possible, perhaps, so far as the 
basis of sympathy extends, but impossible 
toward mankind as such. The dull, stupid. 



GOD AND THE GOOD 79 

commonplace crowd who grovel on the earth, 
and spend themselves in commonplace, every- 
day things — are we to love these; and not only 
those who are beautiful and glorious, who are 
healthy, happy, and strong, but the ugly, the 
sick, the weak, and the disagreeable — life's 
step-children ? And those who try our patience 
a thousandfold, who often wrong us, who check 
us and hinder us — are we to love them ? That 
is impossible; here it is surely our duty to hate. 
Love would be contemptible compliance and 
cowardice, or weak, idle good-nature. And, 
moreover, are we to love our enemy ? Love of 
an enemy is a mere phrase of hypocrisy, or sim- 
ply deceitful and concealed prudence which tri- 
umphs all the more certainly over the enemy 
by cool, calculating self-control and restrained 
anger. 

The gospel replies to this No with a decided, 
quiet Tes. Jesus lived this love. He loved just 
the commonplace, ordinary people — ^just those 
to whom He was not attracted by sympathy, 
who indeed shocked His holy and upright soul, 
and whom good society passed by with con- 
tempt. Yet no one can reproach Jesus with 
weakness and sentimental philanthropy. His 
was an austere, proud, and kingly nature. He 
gripped the soul of men to whom He turned in 



8o FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

love; He roused and stirred their whole being 
and forced them to an absolutely new life. 

The gospel gives us the solution of the prob- 
lem. It demands and proclaims this love in 
God's name. Supposing such love is impossible 
to man's natural self, faith in God gives a 
strength which removes mountains and flings 
the trees into the ocean. With faith nothing is 
impossible. Now, this is the explanation: 
When a man believes in a living God, who, 
in all His plans for the world, fixes His at- 
tention first and foremost on the individual, 
personal life, and whose will and thought are 
directed toward a great company of individual 
spirits, between whom He desires to be the con- 
necting link, he gradually becomes capable, in 
the great struggle of life, of exercising love in the 
sense of the gospel. This love is not dependent 
on the hypothesis of natural, human sympathy, 
but is based on the belief in the value of every 
human soul in God's sight, and in the Divine 
idea which exists in every human soul, though 
often concealed by ugly wrappings and hidden 
in dross or distorted beyond recognition. Thus 
it becomes comprehensible how such love as 
this never changes into mere weak good-nature. 
For as we are conscious that we ought only to 
have pleasure in ourselves, and sympathy with 



GOD AND THE GOOD 8i 

our own life in so far as we develop this idea of 
God within us, we feel that our neighbor is only 
worthy of love in this sense. Love of our neigh- 
bor may therefore be united with genuine, pas- 
sionate anger, for this love hates everything that 
destroys God's handiwork in us and in our 
neighbor. Such love as this may become a ham- 
mer and chisel to knock away all the barren 
rocks which have hidden the precious metal. 

Thus a new vital element came into the 
world with the advent of the gospel — the will to 
love, powerfully directed toward the individual; 
the will to love, demanded by God and made 
possible in and with the faith in God. No one 
has, indeed, recognized this more clearly than 
the apostle Paul when he speaks of faith which 
works through love and of love as the fulfilling 
of the law. No one recognized more clearly 
than he how the Christian's love of his fellow- 
men did not spring from rational reflection, but 
from a God-given strength and inspiration, 
from the enthusiasm of a heart filled with faith 
in God. St. Paul named this wonderful new 
power in life the Spirit of God. Christians are 
those who are impelled by the Spirit of God. 

It is true that with all this we are only at the 
very beginning of all those difficult and serious 
questions which concern Christian life on its 



82 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

moral side. For now we find that the individual 
human being, especially if we consider his real 
self and his higher life, is most closely connected 
with the life of human society in its narrower 
and wider circles, in marriage and the family, 
as one who pursues a civil calling, as a member 
of a profession and a class, as a part of the 
State, the nation, and mankind, with all its 
eternal efforts toward the Good, the True, and 
the Beautiful. And, again, these moral posses- 
sions of the community are most intimately con- 
nected with those efforts and labors which, 
broadly speaking, we regard as the work of civi- 
lization. For all these efforts are based upon 
a natural, material existence, from which they 
derive their natural powers, and they wither 
whenever the roots are neglected. In the gospel 
of Jesus and in primitive Christianity these 
questions remain absolutely in the background. 
The gospel goes straight to the heart of things, 
concerns itself directly with the highest moral 
and religious efforts of human life, tells us on 
what everything ultimately depends, and in its 
transcendental idealism overleaps almost all the 
means and conditions by which, and under 
which, the higher life of man works and devel- 
ops. It has only impressed upon our conscience 
one thing with unmistakable clearness — that 



GOD AND THE GOOD 83 

man does not reach to his highest development 
in soHtude, but in society. But when the gospel 
speaks of human society, it is only referring to 
the simplest relations between man and man 
and not (speaking generally) to all the compli- 
cated forms and shapes of a society in which 
human life actually moves and has its being. 
Only a new seed was sown which awaits devel- 
opment, the first impetus which demands fur- 
ther independent and creative force. 

Thus, whilst in the long course of the history 
of Christianity, in opposition to its original 
simplicity, questions of human life in society in 
its narrower and wider relations rose imperiously 
and demanded consideration, the primitive, in- 
dividualistic idealism of the gospel became sub- 
ject to sharp tension and almost unbearable 
antagonisms. The centre of gravity of all moral 
effort appears to be shifted; the endeavor after 
universal good, the labor on behalf of the forms 
and laws of human life in society, and for the 
sake of possessions and things of value which 
here come into consideration, seem constantly 
to be of far more importance and essential sig- 
nificance than the activity and energy of love 
applied to the individual. But as this work in 
the shaping of human life as lived in society is 
again directly connected with the works and 



84 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

the acquisitions of material civilization, and 
with the scientific and technical government of 
the material world around us, there is always 
a danger of the truly moral work of the human 
race being confused with that of general civiliza- 
tion and becoming identified with it. And then, 
lastly, as this necessary work of the human race 
which is directed toward the universe and the 
universal basis of human life is, to a very large 
extent, conditioned by the laws of nature, and 
consequently is subordinate to other laws, the 
difficult problem arises as to whether the moral 
demands of the gospel can co-exist with this 
great work of our civilized nations, in which the 
laws of the natural struggle for existence and 
questions of power and capacity play such an 
important part. This problem specially presses 
upon us children of a later day, when the work 
of mankind everywhere has grown so enor- 
mously, and has given rise to the conflict of 
international rivalry, of international world- 
industry; and when the national struggles of 
the races, ranks, and callings absorb all energies 
in such a way that the claims of the individual 
life threaten to be stifled. 

In these matters there is for the Christian 
faith no covenant and no surrender. It will no 
longer deny the necessity of all such work; it 



GOD AND THE GOOD 85 

will gain courage joyfully to acknowledge and 
affirm it up to a certain definite point. But it 
will never permit itself to become weary of lift- 
ing the conscience of the individual above and 
beyond all the busy Hfe of man. It will have to 
hold up to the spiritual eye of mankind the 
great scales for judging ultimate truth and 
reality. It will not cease to tell mankind that 
the final issue does not depend on the abstract 
questions of the Good, the True, and the Beau- 
tiful, but on the individual human soul in which 
these abstract questions ^'live and move and 
have their being"; that the final significance of 
all that gigantic work which we call civilization 
consists in this, that the individual and as many 
individuals as possible in the varied and mani- 
fold labors of their life, penetrate to the deepest 
reality and dwell with it in their soul. Faith 
teaches us to recognize that the value of human 
activity, whatever form it takes, whether it is 
engaged on the periphery and helps to fashion 
the universal, natural foundation of our exist- 
ence, or whether it lies nearer the centre of all 
life, is measured according as the worker is 
faithful to Almighty God, who wills that we 
should find in work our higher, true self. It 
tells us that the highest value of our existence 
is not to be found in the moments of a great 



86 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

worldly success, but in all the quiet times of our 
life when soul met soul, individual existence 
touched individual existence and strove together 
for the final reality. It has the courage to call 
the great little and the little great, and does not 
allow itself to be bewildered by human life, 
which is ever growing vaster and vaster in its 
work and its opposing forces; but, like the 
needle of the compass, it points unweariedly in 
one definite direction. And yet in spite of all 
conflict and opposition, faith is, indeed, indis- 
pensable to that universal human work; it pre- 
serves it from becoming purposeless and from 
finally collapsing. 

But this is not the place to enter more fully 
into the separate and manifold difficult ques- 
tions and problems which here confront us. 
We desire to understand the Christian belief 
in its unique character, not to defend it. And 
in all that we have dealt with so far, we have not 
yet reached the highest and final point. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SUMMIT 
REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS OF SINS 

npHE Gospel shows us moral good, and our 
task and work toward it to be so far- 
reaching and deep that an instinctive feeling is 
awakened in us with regard to it — that of our 
own impotence and even of the opposition of 
our sensual self. The one always co-exists with 
the other — the Divine command which streams 
through our innermost being in all its majesty, 
and the knowledge that our earth-born nature 
revolts against this command, and feels it to be 
in contradiction to its own being. This contra- 
diction and this discord are not to be argued 
away. For we cannot regard the evil in us as 
something that is not yet good, as a necessary 
stepping-stone to higher perfection, rather we 
feel It as a contradiction, as something that 
ought not to exist under any circumstances; nor 
can we diminish the majesty of God^s holy will 
or abate His claims. We are confronted here 

87 



88 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

with the insoluble discord of a lower and a 
higher world, of will and ought. The gospel 
frees us from this lack of harmony by faith in 
God; its nature and its significance reach their 
highest point in the proclamation of redemption 
and the forgiveness of sins. 

Belief in redemption, the longing for redemp- 
tion, lie hidden at the basis of all religion. In 
all religions the impelling force is the endeavor 
of man to rise above his own small and condi- 
tioned world, to get free of selfish desires, and 
to find a surer support than his own self can 
offer him. Hence the phenomena of self-sur- 
render, of self-sacrifice carried to the extent of 
sacrificing the bodily life, the child, and sexual 
honor, are frequently to be found in the lowest 
stage of religious life. 

Thus the thought of redemption runs through 
the religions and grows with their growth. What 
has not mankind, indeed, understood by re- 
demption in the course of the history of religion ? 
In the province of national religions people 
hoped to obtain from the Godhead redemption 
from national misfortune and national misery. 
A classic example of this is the national religion 
of Israel, with its belief in Jehovah the Deliv- 
erer and Avenger. In the Jewish religion of the 
Law redemption or reconciliation meant release 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 89 

from material and ritualistic impurity which 
hindered the individual from approaching his 
God. When an Israelitish woman had borne 
children she was obliged to cleanse herself from 
her impurity by religious preparations and 
acts. Impurity and sin are still considered of 
almost like significance. The ideal of redemp- 
tion held by the prophets rises to a far higher 
level. The deliverance of the people of Israel 
is not the first thing that they long for; they 
can, indeed, even bear the thought of the de- 
cline of their own nation and reconcile it with 
their faith. But that righteousness should con- 
quer and triumph, and that unrighteousness 
should be overcome — it is toward this that their 
faith in redemption is directed. Their God is 
the Redeemer and the Deliverer because He 
accomplishes that. 

In the expiring Greek world likewise the idea 
of redemption plays an important part, and in 
the striving for redemption which here arises it 
means to get free from the sensual and material 
world, from the whole sphere of illusion and 
semblance, of dulness and slothfulness, of ugli- 
ness and discord; to press forward to the eternal 
world of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, to the 
world of the holy gods from whom man, in the 
best part of his nature, is descended. Finally, 



90 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

if we look toward the East, toward the ancient 
religions of India, we shall see that there the 
idea of redemption is very powerful. It means 
freedom from this manifold, diversified, and 
necessarily painful individual existence; in 
Brahminism it is absorption into the universal, 
one. Divine Being; in Buddhism it is entering 
into the peace of eternal annihilation. 

The Christian belief also is eminently a belief 
in redemption. It is not St. Paul who is the 
originator of this belief; it is very clearly pro- 
nounced in the gospel. If, indeed, the cate- 
gorical imperative predominates in the latter, 
there yet rings close to it the joyous, clear sound 
of the message of redemption. For the gospel 
is the proclamation of God's kingdom, of God 
who is near us in His kingdom. And if this 
proclamation signifies on the one hand judg- 
ment and repentance, on the other hand it 
means felicity and redemption. "Blessed are 
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven. Blessed are they that hunger and 
thirst after righteousness, for they shall be 
filled. '^ And in the preaching of God's king- 
dom Jesus promises not merely redemption 
from personal misery and from the misery of 
national life; His redemption stretches far be- 
yond this. A new and higher time is to come^ 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 91 

and in it and with it a new and higher Hfe; and 
this life has so Httle to do with the other, is so 
little commensurable with it, that in losing the 
one man finds the other. And this has ever 
been the idea throughout the history of the 
Christian religion. Wherever its leaders, be it 
St. Paul, or St. Augustine, or Luther, or Schlei- 
ermacher, have grasped the Christian faith in 
its fullest significance it has always been re- 
vealed to them as belief in redemption. 

If we desire to understand the nature of the 
Christian belief with regard to redemption, we 
may say as follows: Redemption in the sense of 
the gospel means to get free and to escape from 
the natural, sensually inclined self that sees in 
itself the object of its life and strivings. To be 
redeemed means to be caught up by the power 
of God; redemption signifies the experience by 
which the / is removed from the centre of the 
individual's contemplation of the world and is 
forced to revolve with its whole life round God. 
Redemption no longer means to us freedom 
from this or that particular thing in regard to 
this or that external matter, but we feel that it 
touches the very roots of our existence. For all 
the oppression, anguish, and misery of life arise 
from this, that our ego in all the experiences of 
its life looks upon itself in its isolation and not 



92 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

on the will of the almighty God which is there- 
by revealed; and all these miseries vanish as 
soon as this presumptuous standpoint is aban- 
doned and exchanged for the contrary one. 
Redemption in the Christian sense of the word 
does not mean, indeed, surrender to abstract 
powers and laws, be it the power of righteous- 
ness and holiness or the ideals of the Good, the 
True, and the Beautiful, but surrender to the 
personal, almighty God. And finally it means, 
not a casting away and contempt of life, but 
elevation to a higher life. We surrender to God 
our being, which until then had desired to be 
self-sufficing and to revolve on its own axis, 
in order to receive this self from Him again, 
consecrated and ennobled. We no longer 
arrange the course of our life in accordance 
with our own will, but we accept the law 
of our Hfe from His hand; yet at the same 
time we very soon learn to recognize this law 
as the expression of our own higher being 
and life. 

Thus our faith in God is a very profound 
experience, and wherever it is so felt it is bound 
up with deep sufferings. To accept God, to 
come to Him, always means to give up part of 
our being. We do not attain to God in so 
simple a way that we merely have to bethink us 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 93 

of the primal basis of our nature and find Him 
there. But God affects us as a harsh necessity, 
as a strong compulsion, which we resist, as the 
sculptor^s hammer which strikes the hard stone. 
Something within us — often a great deal — must 
be broken and destroyed, something must be 
utterly cast away if the new Hfe is to arise. All 
true faith is conversion, though not of such 
a kind that we experience it in a flash, objec- 
tively and comprehensibly to the senses. But 
our religious feeling develops through the 
struggle which, spread over a long period of 
time, sometimes assumes gentler, sometimes 
more violent forms; which sometimes is most 
active, sometimes quiescent, but yet always ex- 
ists. It is also said of our lives, but in a broader 
sense, "Whosoever would save his life shall 
lose it.'' 

In and with this redemption which is accom- 
plished in us when we encounter the reality of 
God in our life, our powers for good in the 
gospel sense of the word are now freed. For 
the main obstacle which arises within us against 
the claim of loving our neighbor is our sensual 
egoism, the efforts of the ego to receive the laws 
of life from its own material, isolated being 
alone. But if this egoistic passion of man is en- 
tirely annihilated in the presence of God's ma- 



94 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

jestic reality, if we are cast out from the centre 
of our own contemplation, and God is placed 
there, the road is now open for moral goodness. 
And, on the other hand, in faith we compre- 
hend God as the common bond which binds 
spirits together, as the almighty will who has 
appointed to each the measure and the goal of 
his life, and unceasingly acts so that those who 
recognize in His will the law of their life live to- 
gether in harmony, whilst wherever this does 
not happen there is meaningless friction and 
waste of force. 

Thus our faith in God brings a deep dishar- 
mony into our life, but at the same time it frees 
us from it. Whenever faith enters a human soul 
it causes the lower, sensual nature to rise in re- 
volt, and at the same time it gives the power to 
overcome this opposition. 

In truth, we may go farther and assert that in 
this belief in redemption is rooted, not merely 
the power for good, but the permanency of our 
whole, higher, spiritual life. For is not this 
spiritual life of ours directed toward, and estab- 
lished upon, the redemption of our sensual, 
lower being and its release from sensual fetters ? 
In all the inquiries and investigations concern- 
ing truth, when, transcending purely empirical 
knowledge, we declare this to be fictitious and 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 95 

that fact, this dream and illusion and that 
reahty, we are in truth freeing our ego from the 
conditions and the barriers of sensual experi- 
ence. We are proceeding with our own laws of 
thought, and though we have gained these 
through experience, yet with regard to this ex- 
perience we estimate it by the laws we have 
gained, and freeing ourselves from illusion, we 
press forward, step by step, to the deeper reality. 
When we consider existence all around us with 
a receptive mind for the Beautiful, the Harmo- 
nious, and the Sublime, we control and drive 
back our directly sensual impressions of natural 
pleasure and displeasure, and free ourselves 
from sensual passions. And stepping out of the 
isolation of our own self, we stretch our grop- 
ing, fumbling hands toward a Being related to 
us and comprehensible to us, who reveals Him- 
self in the nature around us. And finally, when 
in the work of our life we evolve a moral person- 
ality — a true self — then, to a certain extent, we 
free ourselves from the conditions of the exter- 
nal world, and we learn gradually to employ 
everything that comes to us from without as 
stones and material for the building of our own 
life which we erect from within outward, ac- 
cording to its own laws, however imperfect they 
may still be. We feel that we are no longer 



96 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

driven aimlessly hither and thither by events 
and occurrences, but are strengthened in the con- 
sciousness of our ov^n freedom. 

Thus all our higher, spiritual striving aims at 
redemption and release, but it threatens, indeed, 
to break down without support if it does not 
obtain its foundation in faith. Carking doubts 
cling around on all sides. Is it really a fact that 
our search for truth brings us nearer to the 
reality, that our knowledge and understanding 
are equal to this reality ? Or does not our 
knowledge and understanding lead us farther 
away from it ? All questions of knowledge end 
in a jfinal question which knowledge itself cannot 
decide. And all that we feel in the enjoyment 
of the Beautiful and the Sublime — is all that, 
perhaps, but an illusion, 3. fata morgana^ a mere 
trick of the imagination, and not the colored 
reflection of a higher reality which is full of 
promise } And when we think to shape our 
life freely from within outward, is that not only 
miserable deception .^ Are we, perhaps, only 
free as a bird that is fastened to a long string, 
and thinks itself free for a while as it flies about 
in the air, until it becomes all the more bitterly 
conscious of its delusion .? What are we who 
desire to penetrate, master, and control the 
universe .^ Are we not beings limited in all the 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 97 

fibres of our existence, and, moreover, strangely 
powerless in our strivings and our willing ? 

It is only faith which gives the true basis to 
all our higher, spiritual striving; for it tells us 
that this struggle is not merely an emanation of 
arbitrary despotism, by which the little and 
circumscribed will opposes an antagonistic en- 
vironment which would necessarily crush it. 
It tells us that all is in obedience to the Divine 
Will, a Divine obligation that is laid upon our 
being, which we, at the same time, perceive to 
be the law of our own being. It is faith which 
gives us the courage and the strength to illumine 
with the torch of our knowledge the hidden 
corners of existence. For it is our God's world 
which we acknowledge, and the laws of our 
thinking are given by Him. Faith gives us the 
courage and the strength rightly to rejoice in 
the Beautiful, to stand reverently before the 
Sublime, the Awful, and the Terrible — for it is 
God's nature which reveals itself in all things — 
and to build up our life in accordance with the 
law of inward freedom — for it is God who gives 
it us. Or let us once more consider it from the 
other point of view; in faith we experience, with 
concentrated strength, the fact that we are freed 
from our egoistic, sensual self which stands in 
isolation. No power and might in the world are 



98 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

strong enough to accomplish this release. But 
when God frees us, then are we free indeed. 
Thus, then, faith works as a redeeming and 
releasing power in its widest application, on all 
our higher life and spiritual striving. In our 
innermost soul, indeed, we experience its power 
in the direct uplifting of the soul to God and in 
the unlocking and freeing of the will to do 
good, in the strength to love, in surrender to the 
good and Divine Will which is directed toward 
a community of spirits. 

But now we are further confronted with the 
experience that this striving to rise from the 
lower sensual life to the higher life willed by 
God, or indeed this ascent through Divine 
strength, is not straightway accomplished in us, 
but only amid constant opposition and con- 
tinual checks which proceed from our lower 
nature; there is defeat and victory, falHng and 
rising. We are here brought face to face with 
the absolutely irrational fact of sin and evil. 
For however much, indeed, the reflective under- 
standing might force us to acknowledge that, 
because everything is to be traced back to God, 
therefore what we call sin is somehow condi- 
tioned by Him, yet our conscience will always 
make us responsible for our sin. But here it is 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 99 

not a matter for us of the theoretical solution of 
these final questions, but of the way out of this 
misery, which our faith procures for us. And 
so we say, finally, that our faith is a faith of the 
forgiveness of sins, and finds therein its com- 
pletion and consummation. Everything that 
we call sin is an act against our higher and 
God-given destiny, is, therefore, a wrong done 
to God and His holy will, is an interruption of 
our personal relation to God. But this interrup- 
tion must be put an end to, and this is accom- 
plished by a spontaneous and inscrutable act of 
Divine love, by which He forgives sin. 

The gospel of Jesus — and here we have the 
highest and greatest thing in it — makes us cer- 
tain and secure of a God who forgives sins. In 
His most beautiful parables Jesus proclaimed 
the God who, out of the fulness of His loving- 
kindness, in fatherly love, pardons and forgives 
sins. In the prayer which He taught His dis- 
ciples to pray the requests for the forgiveness of 
sins and for redemption are at the end, the 
climax. But Jesus did not merely teach the 
forgiveness of sins; He poured it forth upon the 
world. Only thus could the belief become liv- 
ing. For it is a belief that is beyond all calcu- 
lation. Our reflective understanding does not 
tell us that God forgives sins, rather it tells us 



100 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

that God repels sinful man. It shows us 
Almighty God resting on Himself, on the hid- 
den depths of His own being, who in no wise 
needs us, who offers no reason why He should 
not destroy the vessels of His almighty power 
which do not correspond to His will. A Divine 
power was required to fetch down the fire of 
Divine grace from heaven; and from Jesus 
there streamed forth the certainty of the for- 
giveness of sin. He comprehended the Divine 
grace revealed in the forgiveness of sins in its 
perfect absoluteness and unconditionalness. He 
possessed the courage to proclaim, however 
strong His conviction was of the corruption of 
His race and of the human nature around him, 
that God forgives sins without conditions wher- 
ever the souls of men yearn for the Divine for- 
giveness of sins in vital need and with genuine 
longings. And finally. He proclaimed the for- 
giveness of sin as a free, personal act of the 
living God, without any mediation whatever 
through deeds, things, and outward acts. 

He did not only teach all this, but He acted 
it. And wherever there still existed one last 
spark of longing in a human heart, one last 
faint desire for communion with the living God, 
He cast the full beam of Divine grace into the 
human soul, and performed the miracle of 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS loi 

kindling new life in a dead man. He made 
possible the apparently impossible. Thus a 
stream of certainty concerning the forgiveness 
of sins has flowed into our world through Him, 
and continues to exercise an influence in a 
thousand links and chains through the com- 
munion of His Spirit. 

And we must not hesitate to acknowledge 
that this is the highest and final point in our 
faith in God when we can accept and conceive 
God as the God who forgives sins. We know 
that we do not keep and preserve this belief as 
the result of our rational reflection but it is 
borne in upon us by the power of the Spirit 
which is living in the communion of our faith. 
We do not desire, thereby, to over-emphasize 
and exaggerate the belief in the forgiveness of 
sins. In the history of Christianity this procla- 
mation often assumes a form which threatens 
to check the spirit and the activity of the new 
life which it should kindle. There are Chris- 
tians to whom the thought of their sinful- 
ness appears to have become everything; from 
whom we might get the impression that being 
a Christian consists in considering oneself a 
wicked person. There are Christian circles 
which are menaced with the danger that the 
avowal of sinfulness threatens to become no 



102 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

longer an experience, but a doctrine, a promi- 
nent dogma; especially is this the case when this 
avowal is united with untenable speculations 
concerning the nature and origin of sin. There 
is in Christian life a certain frame of mind in 
which people are so fascmated with the thoughts 
of sin that they forget there is a higher goal in 
Christian life than forgiveness of sins — com- 
munion with God and eternal life. 

In opposition to these ideas, we desire to hold 
firmly to this, that religion, faith, is primarily 
a joyful advance and progress. To believe is 
to find God, and in Him rest. Belief signifies 
certainty, joy, a feeling of being at home. It is 
thus that the religious life awakens in the souls 
of children if they are left undisturbed by any 
dogmatically introduced teaching. Only grad- 
ually do we become conscious of the other and 
darker side of religious life. But the former 
aspect dwells with us. To believe means to 
feel oneself placed before the good and holy 
will of God, and therewith before the greatest 
task of our life: "Ye therefore shall be perfect, 
as your heavenly Father is perfect.'^ That is the 
first and the last word, and it must never be 
forgotten. 

But it is, indeed, just when we do this, when 
we place our soul in the presence of the holy 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 103 

God and His good-will, that there arises in us 
from our experience the feeling of our insuf- 
ficient strength, of our constant falling short of 
the goal appointed for us. Then, trembling 
and stammering, we stand before the Holy 
One, and know that nothing can release us 
from our misery but belief in the forgiveness of 
sins. And we know, further, that we do not 
only need forgiveness of sins for this or that 
particular case; an absolutely impassable abyss 
separates us from the holy, almighty God. For 
all our moral strivings and the work of our life 
are, and remain, at best, imperfect and frag- 
mentary. But God wills completion and per- 
fection. From out of this misery of our life 
faith alone rescues us, which here again breaks 
in with its "and yet,'' and tells us that God 
wants us as we are, if we will only let ourselves 
be influenced by His elevating power, by His 
mercy, which covers our imperfections. Paul 
called this experience and this certainty, which 
did not refer to a particular case but to human 
life generally, justification. Let us put on one 
side, for the moment, the word which Paul 
coined, and the speculations which, to Paul, 
were bound up in the doctrine of justification, 
especially those concerning the reconciliatory 
means of justification — Christ's blood or Christ's 



104 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

death. It is experience itself that is indispen- 
sable to the Christian faith. The beHever needs 
the universal certainty that in spite of all oppo- 
sition and hindrances God belongs to him and 
he to God; and he attains this when he joins 
the stream of religious certainty which went 
forth from Jesus of Nazareth, and flows along 
with it. 

Now, all this means no weakness of our lifers 
energy, and no yielding to a weary and ex- 
hausted frame of mind, but a deeper, more 
earnest, and true comprehension of reality; and 
truth and reality can never crush and paralyze 
strength, but only exalt it. In order to perceive 
this let us once more compare Christianity 
and the ancient philosophy which, together 
with Christianity, ruled the earlier world. How 
closely, in many ways, this spiritual power, 
represented by the names of Socrates, Plato, 
and the Stoics approaches Christianity; how 
much on either side there is that is closely con- 
nected! But on this one point the basic differ- 
ence is seen. The characteristic of the Greek 
classical world which finds here its highest ex- 
pression is absolute self-confidence and trust in 
the goodness of Nature. Let us imagine a Stoic 
confronted with the Lord's Prayer — he would 
have been able to join in joyfully with the first 



REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 105 

half of it, but when he came to the request for 
the foro^iveness of sins he would have shut his 
lips tightly, and his sympathies would have 
vanished. And even when, in later times, trust 
in the goodness of this world and in a recogniz- 
able meaning of the universe disappeared more 
and more, the endeavor was still directed then, 
as before, toward upholding one thing in this 
mysterious, impenetrable and cold world — con- 
fidence in one's own ego^ the stoical attitude. 

Then there arose in this world, which was 
profoundly ill at ease and did not know how to 
rid itself of the evils of life, a new and conquer- 
ing power. It conquered because it had under- 
stood more profoundly truth and reality. And 
it announced that it was the highest thing for 
man to abandon this inflexible and unyielding 
attitude, and to learn one thing — the surrender 
of his own self, surrender as it was understood in 
its deepest and most vital sense, in the experi- 
ence of redemption and forgiveness of sins 
(justification). The Christian belief brought 
into the world that was growing old the great 
mystery of death and re-birth, and with this 
mystery arose victorious the new redeeming life. 

Redemption and the forgiveness of sins — 
both, finally, are most closely connected. If in 
redemption we experience, primarily, the power 



io6 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

which frees from sin, and releases the will 
toward the good, in the forgiveness of sins or 
reconciliation we lose the oppressive feeling of 
moral guilt which paralyzes our powers. In the 
Indian religion the deepest longing for redemp- 
tion was summed up in the cry of "get rid of 
life''; in Christianity it was "get rid of sin and 
get rid of guilt and press forward to a higher 
life." And thus, on this final point, the exalted 
spiritual character of our faith in God comes 
once more prominently forward. Its posses- 
sions lie beyond the maintenance or the sur- 
render of this natural life. 



CHAPTER VII 

ETERNAL HOPE 

^TpHUS our faith in God is entirely based on 
personality. We believe in the Almighty 
God, who surrounds us with the profundity of 
His nature and His works, as the God of our 
life, as our heavenly Father, who keeps His 
glance directed toward the individual, personal, 
spiritual life of man, and surrounds it with His 
providence. We believe in the God whose 
world-design finds its goal in a kingdom of 
spirits, the connecting link of all our higher 
spiritual fellowship. We find this God when 
we free ourselves from our lower, sensual being 
and selfish existence, and discover in His 
thoughts which He communicates to us the law 
of our higher life. Or, better, we find Him in 
letting Him find us, when we experience His 
redeeming power and His grace which releases 
us from sin. And what we experience is the 
freeing of the higher personal life, and what we 
are freed from is the misery of personal insuf- 
ficiency and guilt. 

107 



io8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

This Christian behef is completed in Hope. 
But Hope has as its contents the eternal value 
and import of this higher personal life. And 
as this depends, finally, on the individual and is 
nowhere present but in the ego and the many 
single individualities v^hich experience this 
higher life, the Christian hope rises boldly to the 
belief in the eternal value and import of the 
individual life, so far as this has emerged from 
a sensual state to a higher existence and has 
found in God the law of its being. 

It must be carefully noted that this hope is 
the summit of the whole building, and not its 
foundation. And we must not take it for 
granted that those who in an age so disinclined 
for this thought cannot assent to this hope are, 
therefore, without the foundations of the Chris- 
tian faith. No demand and no law must be 
laid down here. Hope is never to be demanded. 
It resembles the hope of the blossoming of 
plants whose development is patiently awaited. 
But, on the other hand, it must also be said that 
in the long course of the history of Christianity 
the hope of eternal life has always been united 
with a living and strong faith. It is true that 
in the process of the development of the Chris- 
tian idea of the Cosmos all those varied and 
fantastic expectations of a more or less immi- 



ETERNAL HOPE 109 

nent end of the world — of one great Judgment 
Day, of the bursting open of the graves at the 
trumpet call, of the bodily resurrection of the 
dead, and the coming of the Judge of all the 
world — have more and more disappeared, or, at 
least, have been removed to the periphery of our 
religious life. But the hope of the eternal life 
of human personality pervaded by God's Spirit 
has been preserved throughout the whole course 
of the history of Christianity. It has also been 
preserved by the leaders on whom the founda- 
tions of our modern intellectual life rest. Kant's 
rational belief in God which rested on a dualistic 
basis, and Goethe's view of the world, compre- 
hending nature and spirit as far as possible as 
one, yet ending in theism, meet here. 

This hope of Christian life stands, indeed, on 
a height not to be reached by rational proof; it 
is deep rooted in faith and is only attainable 
through it; but through it it is attainable, and 
indeed faith is indispensable for its perfection 
and consummation. Christian faith in God, 
whenever it was active and living, has always 
and at all times been a matter of Thou and /, 
however small and insignificant the human / 
may appear in contrast with Almighty God. 
The goal of a perfect, mystically quietistic ab- 
sorption in God has always remained essentially 



no FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

foreign to our faith. But whoever has found 
God after the manner of our faith has had an 
experience which lends eternal value and sig- 
nificance to our life here below. From eternity 
our destiny was pre-ordained in God's all-com- 
prehensive plan, and we were appointed to our 
place; an eternity depends upon how we fulfil 
our life at the place assigned to us. Everything 
that meets us in our transitory life we learn to 
focus through the power of faith, to harmonize 
into a whole which has still much that is incom- 
plete and imperfect, but which yet is and must 
be essentially an affirmation of the thought 
implanted in us by God. And whenever our 
faith is genuine we are conscious in everything 
of a strength which nothing in the world can 
overpower, a joy and quiet composure which 
can never be taken away from us. But in every 
one who has experienced this truly there arises 
the joyous presage of the eternal character of 
this our life; he perceives in himself a strength 
independent of all external events. 

It is not, however, only the strength and the 
power, the confidence and the certainty stream- 
ing forth from our belief in God, but the un- 
solved questions (which, indeed, the believer 
puts on one side) and the troublous and painful 
experiences with which he is burdened that all 



ETERNAL HOPE in 

point to the final solution offered to us by 
Christian hope. 

Our faith bears us upward and onward. We 
are conscious of this in the favored hours of our 
Hfe when there are, apparently, no hindrances 
and obstacles, when our journeying resembles 
a vigorous ascent, when we feel ourselves up- 
lifted by God's strength as on the wings of an 
eagle. But side by side with these there are 
hours of weariness and failure, when cast, faint- 
ing, from the heights, we lie on the ground with 
broken wings. Faith reveals to us the joyous 
certainty that we, placed under a higher guid- 
ance, are carrying out in our life a plan which 
was thought out for us by a higher power; and 
when we discover this our soul is filled with re- 
joicing, as is the miner's when he discovers 
a precious silver vein in the rock. But at the 
same time our hearts are filled with sorrow and 
consternation. For when our life's destiny is 
gradually seen to be nobler we perceive how 
many mistakes we have made, how much time 
we have lost, and how many misspent hours 
and wasted opportunities burden our life. 

But our hope tells us that a time shall come 
when perfect aspiration shall inspire our life, 
when life shall fly upward as the arrow from 
the tensely drawn bow; a time shall come 



112 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

when our life shall be no more a continual seek- 
ing, an alternate losing and picking up again of 
threads. But its path shall lie quite clear before 
our eyes, and our glance will gaze freely over 
the furthest distance. 

Through faith we have found God in the 
very centre of the universe. But yet how mys- 
terious and hidden does He remain to us in His 
workings and in His nature! Through faith we 
build, indeed, strong pillars to which we cling, 
but round about us surge the problems of life. 
We think of all the unsolved questions in the 
lot of the individual and the nations which bur- 
den our life; we think of all those whom death 
has early snatched away before they had at- 
tained to a full and true life, of those who are 
plunged in the darkness of incurable illnesses 
and of madness; we think of the gloomy con- 
dition of a great portion of the human race on 
the lowest stage of existence, of the violent 
destruction of civilized nations. 

Hope tells us that what we see here are un- 
finished lines which await continuation, broken 
fragments which await completion. But we are 
to experience this completion. Now our God 
when we see Him in His working hides Himself 
behind dark clouds of mystery; but we shall 
see Him face to face. 



ETERNAL HOPE 113 

Our faith points to the great aim of spiritual 
communion and its perfection. Here, also, we 
are confronted with difficult questions and rid- 
dles. We asked earlier: Is progress really dis- 
cernible in the history of mankind in the sense 
of getting nearer to the attainment of God's 
kingdom on earth I Will the nations some day 
live together in harmony ? Will war cease ? 
And even if that is so will there be a cessation or 
an alleviation of the less violent yet very intense 
antagonisms ? Will there be a time when the 
merciless war of competition in international 
industry will cease, when the weak will no 
longer be oppressed and down-trodden by the 
strong, and class conflicts and class rivalry will 
pass away ? Will the miseries of society ever 
be even partially alleviated } When the struggle 
for life is made lighter in the relatively higher 
classes will not misery and poverty descend to 
those of a lower stratum and assert their exist- 
ence, inevitably and without possibility of ex- 
tinction ? Is there a real contact and com- 
munion of the nations in the deepest matters of 
spiritual life, in the most important things at 
least — in faith, in religion ? Even if we believed 
in the victory of Christianity over the opposing 
religions, will not the victorious Christian re- 
ligion consist of a whole series of firmly knit 



114 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

organizations, in which an inward and mutual 
understanding is made extremely difficult ? 
With the wealth of life we see how its tasks, 
riddles, and problems increase. We shall never 
master this sphinx! Our works and our efforts 
throughout the ages are fragmentary and im- 
perfect. 

And when we look at our own personal social 
existence, what hidden faults and imperfections 
we perceive! We run and hurry past one an- 
other, and do not know one another — ^^ ships 
that pass in the night/^ Even when we think 
we are most closely in touch and in harmony 
with those who are dear to us, how often little 
events of our daily life make it clear that in 
great stretches of our individual life we were 
solitary and uncomprehended. The confused 
lines of our life are often so indistinct and 
vague to us ourselves; how, then, should we 
make them clear to another ? 

Our Christian hope speaks to us of a higher 
existence in which spirits free from earthly 
dross will be visible to one another, will mingle 
in an inconceivably higher harmony, and will 
lead their life together on a higher plane; when 
the common life of man will have lost its fears 
and pains and problems, and will only betoken 
united effort and a higher flight for the indi- 



ETERNAL HOPE 115 

vidual, and God's will is the visible bond be- 
tween man and man. 

Yet, withal, Christian hope is no weak, 
emotional, and sentimental belief. Material- 
istic personal desire must be entirely cast on one 
side; the hope of seeing again our beloved dead 
— a feeling so often predominant in faith — can 
only exist as a part of the whole belief. There 
is something austere and mighty about the hope 
of our faith. All material coverings must fall 
away; it will be, indeed, a higher life for which 
we hope. We can only faintly divine it. In this 
higher life will there be a continuity of self-con- 
sciousness ? We can only suggest an answer to 
this question. What is the connection between 
the inner life of a butterfly and a caterpillar .? 
In the awakened consciousness of the man how 
little there remains of the impressions and ex- 
periences of the child's soul, how little we are 
conscious of what we were as children! ^^Now 
that I am become a man I have put away child- 
ish things." Some day there will be an awak- 
ing as from a confused dream, and what moved 
us most here on earth in our hopes, our plans, 
our wishes, and our desires will lie behind us in 
the far distance. We shall take over with us 
into eternity only a very little — only the really 
great and true and profound things which 



ii6 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

touched our life closely. And it will be the 
same thing with our hfe in society. Age, race, 
family, calling, position, nationality — all these 
will fall away from us, only those things in 
our personal relationships will remain which 
reach down to the very roots, there where souls 
come into contact with the final and eternal 
things. 

There will be a great casting off of wrappings. 
Borrowed finery, vain trifles and baubles will 
vanish, and hidden beauties, truth, and reality 
will come to light. There will be a great ex- 
change of roles: the first shall be last and the 
last first. *^Oh, Eternity, thou word of thun- 
der!'' 

Beyond all personal hope, yet bound up in 
it, there stretches something still higher — a vast 
and mighty prospect; an eternal, infinite king- 
dom of personal spirits, which consists of the 
past, present, and future generations, in which 
each generation has its position and its place. 
And we who are still in the process of develop- 
ment are not solitary in our earthly wanderings. 
We are already citizens of a higher world, and 
linked with it. Already we are conscious of un- 
seen greetings, unheard whispers and calls. So 
we pursue our life's journey between the stars 
above and the graves beneath. "We bid you 



ETERNAL HOPE 117 

to hope." And over all echoes through the ages 
the majestic saying of the apostle — "that God 
may be all in all.'' 



This is our faith in God. Finally the ques- 
tion may be asked, How do we come to such 
a faith .? But that is a question that cannot be 
answered theoretically; it can only be experi- 
enced. But one thing, however, must be very 
clearly expressed: Belief does not come to us 
from mere necessity, it does not arise from the 
anxieties of our life. If that were so, it would 
be nothing more than a desire and an illusion. 
No; we experience faith, it is true, as an answer 
to our anxious questions concerning life; not 
as our own compulsory answer, however, but as 
a higher power, which forces itself upon us, as 
a revelation which streams in upon us. We re- 
gard it, not merely as an answer to our ques- 
tions and a release from the troubles of our life, 
but also as something which lies beyond it and 
leads onward. We look upon faith as a neces- 
sity which raises us beyond our former existence, 
as a harsh compulsion which is laid upon us; 
and in proportion as it frees us from the misery 
of our existence it lays heavy burdens upon us, 
brings conflicts into our life. To believe is to 



ii8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT 

experience revelations of a new world, of a 
deeper reality. 

Those to whom there has been vouchsafed in 
an especial degree the gift of seeing this deeper 
truth, of expressing it in words and impressing 
it on others, we call the leaders of religion, the 
pious in a special sense, prophets and founders 
of religion. But the mystery of the origin of 
faith consists in this: The mighty ones of the 
earth, the leaders of religious life, the great per- 
sonalities to whom God's Word was compre- 
hensible, and was revealed with inward cer- 
tainty, flash the Divine light from person to 
person. And among all these teachers favored 
by God, who have forced open the heavens for 
us and called down the fire of faith, stands the 
figure of Jesus of Nazareth, towering high above 
all others, as all eyes can see. All that we ex- 
perience in our faith is at every point most 
closely connected with His personal life, and 
is entirely inseparable from Him. And thus 
there is certainly an answer to the question 
which has been asked; and although it is true 
it does not reach back to the mystery of the 
origin of faith, it points in that direction. We 
have and we hold our faith in God in the spir- 
itual communion created by Jesus of Nazareth. 
Place thyself in the electric current of this life, 



ETERNAL HOPE 119 

transmitted by His Spirit, His Holy Spirit, and 
open thy soul to its influence. The Almighty 
God will so work that contact will be made and 
the current will flow through thy soul also. 



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